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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#181

Post by burntsushi »

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…

> IMHO if he has a problem with the way things worked out, he should have chosen a different license.

This is a classic conflation of legalese and ethics/decorum/professional courtesy. Just because something is legal doesn't make it good, and just because something is good doesn't make it legal.

For example, I abhor those who take credit for other peoples' work. But I use a license on software I write that permits folks to do just that.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#182

Post by DanBC »

zeveb wrote: post #180
Fredej wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably gonna be a controversial view but my experience is this as well: Deploying GPL code is a legal process. Deploying BSD is a development process. We spent thousands of dollars on legal advice when deploying GPL. In the end it was largely as we expected it to be: No significant action was needed beyond releasing the code to the components that we already got for free, with the minor modifications we had…

> Deploying GPL code is a legal process. It doesn't have to be. The GPL is very clear; anyone with even a semi-decent high school education can read and understand it. A company which requires legal consultation in order to know how to use GPL code has bigger problems. Of course, you can't both use GPLed code and deny your users' freedom. So don't do that. Sell hardware, sell services, just don't sell closed-source s…

> The GPL is very clear; anyone with even a semi-decent high school education can read and understand it.

The amount of discussion on HN about the GPL, and whether a project is or isn't complying with it, makes me think it's not so easy.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#183

Post by _0w8t »

geocar wrote: post #143
boomlinde wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free or open source software doesn't imply working for free. A copy of your software doesn't (necessarily) entail additional work. I guess whether people in general "work for free" depends on how you define "work" and "free". I work on many different things purely for their utility to my friends and me personally, or just for the fun of creating something. I work and I gain something from it, so the time spent on it…

> I guess whether people in general "work for free" depends on how you define "work" and "free". Then allow me to be clear: If you want to do something, and you get some kind of psychic reward for it; like volunteering in a soup kitchen, then that's great. But if you're only doing that because you're afraid of going to hell, then someone has convinced you to work for free . If you make some software, and someone tell…

When one contributes to a soup kitchen without getting paid in money, the person still gets a value be it a growing social network, a line in a CV, experience of working and organizing people etc. So it is not a work for free as one does get a value that can be exchanged for other things.

Similarly with open source work. It brings a value in forms of contacts and experience.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#184

Post by scott00 »

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.

US copyright law lets you sue for either actual damages plus the infringer's profits OR statutory damages.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#185

Post by kodablah »

jcelerier wrote: post #106
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.

> which rejects the notion that you're poorer today than yesterday just because someone started using some software you wrote. are you arguing that we aren't all poorer with an unmodifiable black box running in our CPUs ?

Arguably, the box could be even blacker were a large company to feel like they had no implementation to turn to and forced to develop everything internally.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#187

Post by nscalf »

muninn_ wrote: post #176
rdslw wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Speaking of ego: "if you arent 25 years old proverbial "javascript developer" ;-)" Why is this necessary?

We all need a massage from time to time.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#188

Post by belorn »

jvdh wrote: post #20
tarruda wrote: post #4

> when companies have told me that they hate the GPL because they are not keen on spending a lot of time, energy, and money modifying some piece of code, only to be required to give it to their competitors for free Some piece of code that also cost time (and possibly someone's else money) to develop, and that they got for free?

It should be noted that Minix is code that was developed by university researchers. Researchers who are payed for by (primarily) European and Dutch tax euros. Also note that many of that time, energy and money to modify GPL code is not just programming time, but also a lot of legal advice time. With BSD-like license it should be immediately clear what you can do with the code (i.e. almost everything).

Writing new code also take time and money, which is why LGPL (including LGPLv3) is heavy in used in industries which have a lot of compeition and no time or money to waste.

To take a example, I often see LGPLv3 in big AAA games. I also see licenses that say "we asked the developer in a email and received special permission". Game studies seems to happy spend legal advice time if it saves them developer time, and from where I stand it seems to be a clear competitive advantage to do so. The only licenses they don't use is those that conflict with their core business model.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#189

Post by kodablah »

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.

> or use something else

Which they did and if there was no alternative, they would develop 100% of it in secret. I think this is the opposite of great.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#190

Post by _jal »

therealmarv wrote: post #86

nah, Linus Torvalds wins. I really really doubt that Minix is more deployed than Linux... just think of three examples (and there are probably many more examples): * Linux in all variants running in billions of VMs and Containers. * Android. * There are not only Intel chips out there. So Kudos to Dr. Tanenbaum but adding all numbers I don't think we have Minix nearly as much deployed as Linux ;)

Reading the actual claim being made helps one respond to the right question:

"MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers"

(emphasis mine)

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