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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#261

Post by cmrdporcupine »

digi_owl wrote: post #82
ekianjo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last sentence is quite pretentious and completely unprovable. And if Linux had not existed we would have had GNU Hurd way earlier in all likelihood.

Torvalds himself seems to have claimed that had Hurd been usable back then, he would never have taken Linux as far as he did. Minix seems to have been barely on his radar, if at all.

Not true at all, MINIX was so much on the radar that the early Linux installations I used all used the MINIX filesystem. As far as I remember, Linus was a MINIX user and that was one of the things that inspired him to attempt what he did.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#262

Post by sctb »

shawnee_ wrote: post #207
simon_o wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong thread? Nothing you wrote has any relationship with what GP commented on.

I deleted my OP; here is the relevant piece for people whose reading comprehension skills are as poor as yours: > That being said: I do agree with Tanenbaum that he deserves more acknowledgement for parts of his system inspiring security design around it. There's lot of hype on this subject; I encourage anybody read more than one perspective about the kinds of trade-offs manufacturers have to make: https://www.techre…

Could you please not be rude to other users here? We're trying to have a civil conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#263

Post by mseebach »

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…

You're conflating different things. Intel is free to use MINIX which is exactly the freedom the creator of MINIX intended when selecting the license. You are not a party to that transaction.

That Intel uses this software for a purpose you disagree with is immaterial to this discussion. Had MINIX not been available under a permissive license, Intel would have found some other (but presumably more expensive) way to largely achieve the same thing. They did not come up with and implement the management engine because MINIX was BSD licensed.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#264

Post by mrstorres »

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…

Minix is crazy how can you use Dr Tannenbaum's chip without informing him. Just insane.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#265

Post by ajnin »

> These discussions were why we put MINIX 3 out under the Berkeley license in 2000

Is he implying that he chose that license specifically because Intel asked for it ?

He claims that that license is the most user-friendly since it gives the user the most freedom, which is true in that case, but he's missing the point, when the FSF and other GPL proponents mention user freedom they talk about the end user freedom, the one at the end of the chain that will have to use the software (i.e. anyone who purchased a semi-recent Intel chip). When considering the user community as a whole, it is clear that they globally get less value from the project since changes don't have to (and don't) get contributed back and they can't make changes to the software that they are using.

Seems very short-sighted to claim a win here when the only 2 parties that benefit are Intel and Tanenbaum's ego.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#266

Post by TallGuyShort »

_0w8t wrote: post #194
jhasse wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So ... Intel violated the BSD license?

That is a good point and explains the letter better. Apparently Intel cannot fulfill even minimal attribution requirements and the letter is a polite reminder for the company of its duties.

Which is pretty sad - even most crappy mobile apps have a page where they list all open source projects including links to source, license terms, copyright attributions, etc.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#267

Post by Fredej »

lmm wrote: post #202
Someone wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. > With BSD-licensed code, that risk is way smaller. The worst you have to do is add a few (or quite a few thousand. Go check Setting/General/About/L…

Where do you get the $150,000 figure from?

I would disagree that the situation is the same. The way to remedy the BSD situation is simple attribution. The way to remedy the GPL situation is release of the entire source code.

>> Worse, the source code of all versions from _before_ that checkin automatically become GPL-licensed (because they contain code that, transitively, becomes GPL because it later was linked with GPL-licensed software) >This is simply false.

Is it? If you are forced to release all your source under GPL any new release of that software will contain software released under GPL, even if the GPL specific changes are rolled back.

My interpretation is this: If you have two functions, A() and B() where A() is released under GPL. If you then release software where B() is defined as :

B(): ... A()

You now have a product which is a work derived from GPL code so you must release the source code for B(). Now you release B() under GPL. So you go back to the commit right before including A() and make a new branch with a new commit:

B(): ... C()

BUT! B() is now source code released under GPL so any changes to it must also be released under GPL.

How have I misunderstood?

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#268

Post by teilo »

rahiel wrote: post #131
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…

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...

The strict meaning of "Redistributions" in that clause means that Intel would have to be distributing the OS itself as a product in binary form. Deploying it in an embedded system, and selling that embedded system, particularly in a form where the user does not have access to the OS as a product, does not meet that definition. Tanenbaum himself concedes this point in this letter.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#269

Post by bm1362 »

wolfgke wrote: post #172
bitdiddle wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#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…

> #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. The BSD license used by MINIX 3 requires attribution: > http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=faq&s[]=license#what_is_t... "The MINIX 3 license is a clone of the Berkeley (BSD) license. In plain English, it says you can do whatever you like with t…

I believe Intel did give attribution, but to MINIX itself. It really is just an ask for a 'hey, thanks' that was deserved.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#270

Post by bm1362 »

josteink wrote: post #132

> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users. The Berkeley license gives software publishers (which are not users) maximum amount of freedom. As an actual X86 user who cannot remove or change this unwanted piece of code running on my machine, I politely disagree about the freedom given to me.

It sounds like there might be a (very tiny) market for an entirely audited GPL stack. Intel made a sound, responsible decision for everyone involved except the privacy crowd.
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