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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#161

Post by wslh »

vanderZwan wrote: post #156
mtgx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The first good faith claim to do is to notice Intel to add the copyright notice.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#162

Post by bitdiddle »

JohnBooty wrote: post #148
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…

It seems entirely earnest. I think the Hacker News crowd is just a little baffled because there are some conflicting emotions on display from Dr. T here. Conflicting emotions are a very human thing to have, and are guaranteed to confuse the engineer crowd. 1. He's glad Minix is useful to others 2. He's slightly hurt that Intel repeatedly asked him for help (which he provided) but never bothered to thank him or even l…

#2. Exactly, seems to me an academic kind of thing, he helped them a lot, a little attribution would not have hurt, and the lawyers could have easily been told to pipe down.

#3. It does offer the maximum freedom to some potential users, but no responsibilities to extend those freedoms to others. In my opinion this is why the GPL truly extends the maximum amount of freedom to everyone, users, lusers, abusers, and just plain old hackers.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#163

Post by vanderZwan »

lucozade wrote: post #61
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…

Not sure about earnest but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't sincere. As to Prof Tanenbaum's style, if I'm feeling a teeny bit uncharitable, I'd say this is perfectly in keeping. Since the infamous exchange between Linus and him where he came off as being a bit condescending, a lot of his writing on that subject has given the strong impression that he grudgingly accepts that Linux "won" but that it's somewhat of a t…

> And that winning means that it's the OS of choice in billions of devices.

You already hint at this, but I would expect that it is more about what that quantity represents (obviously you cannot really untangle these things).

For example, it speaks for itself that number of users has a direct influence on to the number of developers and computer scientists working on the system and improving it. Or from Tanenbaum's point of view, fix issues that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#164

Post by mrighele »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #91
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…

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

Which is exactly what Intel did, since Intel didn't use e.g. Linux. If there were no BSD based OS to use, my bet is that Intel would have continued to use a closed source OS.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#165

Post by todd8 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #156
mtgx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It does cost him. More people would know of MINIX and more would have heard of its creator. More people would buy his books, hire him for consulting on OS design, etc.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#166

Post by jhasse »

_0w8t wrote: post #154
jhasse wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

So ... Intel violated the BSD license?

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#167

Post by wolfgke »

lmm wrote: post #79
avar wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's earnest. If it wasn't he wouldn't have picked the BSD license, which rejects the notion that you're poorer today than yesterday just because someone started using some software you wrote.

The notion of the GPL is that end users are poorer if they don't have source available and can't fix bugs in the code they're using. Intel ME, meaning people are running systems with exploitable vulnerabilities that they can't fix, is one of the clearest arguments in favour of it.

One can also fix bugs without source code available (it is just harder). The Intel ME's problem rather is that one perhaps can fix bugs, but not upload the bug fixes back to the chip because of the required signature.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#168

Post by mrighele »

userbinator wrote: post #64
pulse7 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Minix's license wouldn't be BSD, they would use some other BSD licensed OS or develop it's own...

Earlier versions of ME (the one with an ARC core) used ThreadX RTOS --- proprietary, commercially licensed. I guess Intel eliminated a huge chunk of those licensing costs by moving to x86+Minix instead.

Which in a way it is better also for end users. At least we don't have to pay the license for a software that we don't want to run on our computer :-)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#169

Post by rdslw »

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.

Nope.

His letter point is clearly about widely(1) known debate(2) between him and Linus Torvalds, and ego massage.

(1) widely, if you arent 25 years old proverbial "javascript developer" ;-) - as the debate took place in 1992.

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#170

Post by mavhc »

Someone wrote: post #107
lmm wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that many companies have that attitude towards BSD versus GPL, but is there actually a rational basis for it? Given that you've apparently already gone through the legal process and found out that the GPL means what you think it means, why are you holding it to a higher standard than BSD?

If one of your employees accidentally copies even a single bit of GPL-licensed code into your privately licensed code or statically links against such code even once, and it gets ‘outside’ in any way, you legally have to release that version of your code under the GPL. Worse, the source code of all versions from _before_ that checkin automatically become GPL-licensed (because they contain code that, transitively, bec…

Or you can stop using it, and talk to the copyright holder of the GPL'd code and ask what they want.

Or if it's GPL v3 you have additional rights, fix it in 60 days etc.

http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/compliance-gui... section 5.2

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