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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#151

Post by z3t4 »

simias wrote: post #11

I can't tell if this is earnest or 2nd degree. Can people more familiar with Mr Tanenbaum's style enlighten me? Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum eg…

If you have worked years on something, you rather want people to use it then for all work to be in vain. Even if that means giving up all rights.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#152

Post by Avshalom »

agumonkey wrote: post #116
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #80

All Dr. Tanenbaum is saying is that it would have been the classy thing to let him know, nothing more. Professor Tanenbaum is one of the most respected computer scientists alive, and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least. That is his only (and quite fair) point.

Is it close to being the most used OS with the IME embedding ? lots of mainstream devices don't use Intel chips... I'm sure A.Tannenbaum is flattered (and duly so, Minix 3 is very interesting) but I'm feeling he's patting himself on the back here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project probably beats it handily

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#153

Post by rbanffy »

laythea wrote: post #102
rbanffy wrote: post #89

> this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users I'm sorry, but I don't feel free because of that. What I see is that I have proprietary code I never saw, never vetted and which I don't (and shouldn't) trust that's running on all my computers (not all, but you can get it) and that I don't have the freedom to remove, examine, modify or replace. Th…

I completely sympathise, however your argument is based on a horse that has already bolted. Un-audited binary blobs already exist and run on your computer. Now off course, there is still an argument that you may not want even more un-audited binary blobs running, but security is about the lowest common denominator. We have passed that point already. Resistance is futile!

At least the blob inside my wireless controller has no access to the data that the blob in the ethernet port sends to the NSA...

That little Quark core has access to pretty much everything.

BTW, I'd love to use it to collect very low level performance data on the main CPU.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#154

Post by _0w8t »

jhasse wrote: post #103
gtrubetskoy wrote: post #80

All Dr. Tanenbaum is saying is that it would have been the classy thing to let him know, nothing more. Professor Tanenbaum is one of the most respected computer scientists alive, and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least. That is his only (and quite fair) point.

> and for Intel to include Minix in their chip and not let him know is kind of unprofessional and not very nice to say the least. I guess Minix' license, which allows this kind of behaviour, is the very reason Intel chose Minix in the first place. I imagine it would be very complicated to get management approval for informing Dr. Tannenbaum about the usage in Intel's ME. IMHO if he has a problem with the way things w…

MIT license only states:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

This is weaker than what is in a BSD license:

> Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

That is, BSD license explicitly requires copyright attribution for binaries, while MIT does not.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#156

Post by vanderZwan »

mtgx wrote: post #141
rahiel wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Minix 3 license contains [0]: * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. So it looks like Minix's license does require the copyright/license to be included in distributions. [0]: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...

So could he sue Intel for about a billion dollars now? Also, my guess is this is part "security through obscurity", part Intel not wanting everyone to know that they used someone else's code for its chips' firmware.

IANAL, but assuming this is breaking the licence agreement, wouldn't suing for money only make legal sense if he could show that this infringement had cost him in some way?

Beyond the valid complaint of this being a personal insult, that is.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#157

Post by rbanffy »

josteink wrote: post #136
colejohnson66 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why the GPL is so great IMO. It would force Intel to either release the source code or use something else.

It would also force Intel to give us a means to replace ME with something else which ultimately puts the user in control.

Only the GPLv3 would force Intel to do that. With v2 they can go the TiVo route and make the source available without giving out the means to make the hardware run your own binaries.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#158

Post by boomlinde »

eecc wrote: post #58

Well, if Minix was developed on NL and EU taxpayer dime it’s quite disconcerting that it’s now being used to potentially bug the computers of those same taxpayers. I’m sure nobody would agree to paying for that, so why on earth does this man feel entitled to give away the product of “our” taxes without any restriction

As far as I am concerned I am not paying for my computer to be bugged. MINIX is a research project that is useful and interesting in its own right. That's what the EU is funding. GPS, the internet and the microchip were also publicly funded technologies. I don't think that anyone should object to the funding of these inventions because there are dubious uses of them (all of them sometimes in involuntary surveillance).

Ideally, bugging computers is a legislative issue, and the contract between the vendor of the particular technology employed to do it (in this case not even particularly built for that purpose) and its user is irrelevant.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#159

Post by josteink »

pjmlp wrote: post #140
jhasse wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and easily replaceable by anything else (e.g. Fuchsia). If it's so easy, why hasn't it happen yet?

Most likely money and drivers. Linux comes mostly for free, Fuchsia is still not mature enough and is 100% on Google's budget. However and this is what I always raise up to people rejoicing about Linux on Android, using official Android images, there is very little Linux exposed to application writers. The Java Frameworks are naturally kernel agnostic, and the NDK APIs are quite constrained, with the main goal of bei…

> Linux comes mostly for free, Fuchsia is still not mature enough and is 100% on Google's budget.

Said differently: Linux works and is useful for everyone and has wide corporate backing, while Fuchsia is only useful to Google.

I'll put my bets on which one persists in the long run based solely on that premise.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#160

Post by agumonkey »

Avshalom wrote: post #152
agumonkey wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it close to being the most used OS with the IME embedding ? lots of mainstream devices don't use Intel chips... I'm sure A.Tannenbaum is flattered (and duly so, Minix 3 is very interesting) but I'm feeling he's patting himself on the back here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project probably beats it handily

Maybe it's a smaller class OS compared to Minix though (even though Tannenbaum didn't specify in his letter)
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