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An Open Letter to Intel

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301–310 of 379 posts

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#301
post #46

From his CV: One of the early users of MINIX was Linus Torvalds. He began modifying MINIX to add new features that he thought were needed. Over a period of time he had modified almost everything and launched it as a new operating system, Linux. It is fairly safe to say that had I not written MINIX there would have been no Linux.

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.

>And if Linux had not existed we would have had GNU Hurd way earlier in all likelihood.

Is that provable? :)

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#302
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 lar…

> 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.

We are not a first party in that transaction, but feel very much the consequences. Therefore it does involves others. Most actions have an influence on others and therefore there are responsibilities for the consequences.

If you sell lower quality concrete to a building company which builds a dam that break and kills many people, then you have blood on your hands and should be treated as such, even though you were not a first party in the dam construction.

> That Intel uses this software for a purpose you disagree with is immaterial to this discussion.

It is very much not immaterial. It _might_ be legally irrelevant, but it is not without importance.

> 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.

I hope they need to spend a lot of money and energy and effort for taking others freedom away. The cheaper it is for them, the more likely they do it.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#303
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…

Depends on who the user is. In a company, the company owns the computers, not the users. I'm willing to bet that ME was designed for legitimate corporate deployment scenarios.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#304
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel is not the user. They are a vendor, a publisher. By calling them "users" and saying "users have freedom" you are conflating things needlessly. We are the users here. We severely lack freedom. (Thanks BSD!)

Using copyright laws to force a person to release the fruits of their labor is not a definition of freedom that is widely agreed upon.

You are confusing things here. It is not about releasing fruits of labor. Intel is screwing us over and it is about stopping them.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#305
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm so tired of hearing this. The GPL is only a legal problem if you are trying to skirt the rules and distribute proprietary software but use GPL components. I've never needed to legal advice to deal with GPL code.

> The GPL is only a legal problem if you are trying to skirt the rules and distribute proprietary software but use GPL components. Well, a random developer can't simply assert it - you need lawyers to make sure you really are conforming to the GPL. With BSD, you don't. This is simply the ground reality.

That is not true. If a company does not follow the GPL and is called out, they can simply do what the GPL tells them to do and the case is done.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#306
post #242
post #26

It is interesting to see that Andrew S. Tanenbaum released this letter to the public (probably to show that he was not directly involved in deploying Minix to all those chips), while saying that he is okay with the closed source nature, as long as there are good reasons to do so (to prevent causing any problems for him and for the person who made the decision at Intel). Hey Andrew, if you have no problem with Minix r…

That's exactly the opposite of what he said: "Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs."

Actually, that part was added later.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#307
post #305
post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The GPL is only a legal problem if you are trying to skirt the rules and distribute proprietary software but use GPL components. Well, a random developer can't simply assert it - you need lawyers to make sure you really are conforming to the GPL. With BSD, you don't. This is simply the ground reality.

That is not true. If a company does not follow the GPL and is called out, they can simply do what the GPL tells them to do and the case is done.

>That is not true.

What are you basing this on? Personal experience? Speculation? Other?

>If a company does not follow the GPL and is called out, they can simply do what the GPL tells them to do and the case is done.

Ask Cisco if the lawsuit from the FSF was fictional.

I was involved with the GPL license a few years back when I was consulting on an embedded hardware device product. We wrote to the developer and requested them to re-license the software in exchange for a payment. They refused and we decided to use a differently licensed product in the end, based on legal advice.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#308
post #268
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...

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.

IANAL and someone can correct me but I doubt you're right. Every IOT product I've purchased and even my car either has a printed version of open source licenses or you can access them somewhere within their GUIs.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#309
post #304
post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using copyright laws to force a person to release the fruits of their labor is not a definition of freedom that is widely agreed upon.

You are confusing things here. It is not about releasing fruits of labor. Intel is screwing us over and it is about stopping them.

Its not as black and white. At my company, the company owns the machines, and we have been looking at using Intel's AMT internally. I don't think Intel is screwing us.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#310
post #267
post #202

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. > 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…

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

Years of conversation about this kind of stuff, I don't remember specifically. Looking it up wikipedia says $150,000 is the upper limit for wilful infringement, accidental infringement is lower, but that doesn't affect the argument.

> The way to remedy the BSD situation is simple attribution. The way to remedy the GPL situation is release of the entire source code.

The damages are statutory plus actual damages (almost certainly $0 for someone who doesn't make money off their software directly), not "what you would have done". You have the same options in either case: reach agreement with the person whose copyright you infringed, or go to court and pay the damages. So your worst-case liability is the same either way.

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

As you acknowledged in your reply, you still hold all the copyrights on B and can still release B under any terms you please.

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