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An Open Letter to Intel

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Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#311

Post by davexunit »

ksk wrote: post #307
madez wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reque…

So you wanted to write proprietary software on top of someone's GPL code, the developer couldn't be swayed by money, so now you are bitter about it? Talk about entitlement.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#312

Post by madez »

ksk wrote: post #307
madez wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reque…

>>> you need lawyers to make sure you really are conforming to the GPL.

>> That is not true.

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

The FSF and SFLC use litigation as a _last resort_, when the offender does not cooperate to alleviate the breach of the GPL [See below]. The Linux community is also largely against litigation [https://lwn.net/Articles/698452/].

>> 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.

The FSF tried before to work with Cisco to comply with the GPL:

“In the fifteen years we’ve spent enforcing our licenses, we’ve never gone to court before. While litigation is a last resort, we’re prepared to take the legal action necessary to defend users’ freedoms. With SFLC’s help, the FSF is able to take effective action,” said Peter Brown, executive director of FSF.

from http://www.softwarefreedom.org/news/2008/dec/11/cisco-lawsui...

> 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.

I don't know your situation so I can't comment on it. Maybe your business model depended on your users not having control about the software they use. Because in that case the GPL is a problem.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#313

Post by riffraff »

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...

this can be just a footnote in some manual coming with the cpu, which is likely the thing that actually made the information public.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#314

Post by zeveb »

DanBC wrote: post #182
zeveb wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

I think it's not that the GPL is unclear; it's that people want to violate its provisions while not being held liable for their violations. 'We want three parallel red lines, one green and one black, all intersecting.'

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#315

Post by fasquoika »

rdslw wrote: post #169
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...

From your Wikipedia link:

"I would like to close by clearing up a few misconceptions and also correcting a couple of errors. First, I REALLY am not angry with Linus. HONEST. He's not angry with me either. I am not some kind of "sore loser" who feels he has been eclipsed by Linus. MINIX was only a kind of fun hobby for me. I am a professor. I teach and do research and write books and go to conferences and do things professors do. I like my job and my students and my university. [...] I wrote MINIX because I wanted my students to have hands-on experience playing with an operating system. After AT&T forbade teaching from John Lions' book, I decided to write a UNIX-like system for my students to play with. [...] I was not trying to replace GNU/HURD or Berkeley UNIX. Heaven knows, I have said this enough times. I just wanted to show my students and other students how you could write a UNIX-like system using modern technology. A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. [...] Linus seems to be doing excellent work and I wish him much success in the future.

While writing MINIX was fun, I don't really regard it as the most important thing I have ever done. It was more of a distraction than anything else. The most important thing I have done is produce a number of incredibly good students, especially Ph.D. students. See my home page for the list. They have done great things. I am as proud as a mother hen. To the extent that Linus can be counted as my student, I'm proud of him, too. Professors like it when their students go on to greater glory."

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#316

Post by eecc »

boomlinde wrote: post #158
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)…

Considering we have laws prohibiting the sale of surveillance technology to states suspected of human rights violations, as well as the sale of goods intended for misuse according to our own ethical standards (think medicines used in lethal injection executions) it would be quite asinine to look the other way claiming that fulfilling that particular research purpose exhausts all further uses.

Particularly if it’s potentially used against us, citizens.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#317

Post by vortico »

foodstances wrote: post #276
burntsushi wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

What license allows one to take credit for another's work?

CC0 is another one.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#318

Post by madez »

ksk wrote: post #309
madez wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is cool. Good for you. I don't want to steal anything from Intel. I just want a way to opt out of ME and its siblings.

You seem like a troll or a bittered person.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#319

Post by katastic »

dchest wrote: post #294
xyzzyz wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL3 was practically created to cover this case, as FSF lawyers didn’t feel that GPL2 is enough to enforce that. Check out the TiVoization clause in GPL3 and its history.

No it didn't. GPLv3 was created to cover the case of hardware vendors not allowing to run modified code. They still have to abide by the terms of the license even if they use GPLv2 -- that is, releasing the source code.

I thought GPLv3 was for many issues, not a single issue.

For example, the software-as-a-service loophole that GPLv3 (and AGPL) closes. We actually had an exploitation of said loophole for the open source Space Station 13 game. People were making changes to the game (each server runs their own modifications, and, the game is pure client/server so the entire 'game' is server-side binary only with dumb clients connecting) and some people were making important modifications and not sharing them with the community AND it was intentional because their mods made them the most popular server to play on (because nobody else had the features). It was a big stink, and eventually someone "leaked" the code, but then nobody could tell if that was legal to use or look at and it became a big, confusing legal grey area. All because they didn't start with AGPL or GPLv3 (or some other SaaS-aware license). The original authors probably didn't think anything of it and just thought "GPL is 'good'. So GPL it is." and that was the extent of it.

Re: An Open Letter to Intel

#320

Post by X86BSD »

noncoml wrote: post #212
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.

It’s not about money. Intel has improved the software, by making it more modular, but kept that improvement for themselves. That’s the problem with BSD IMHO.

That's not a problem. You are not entitled to the work of others. And the original bsdl code is just as available to you as it was to them for you to improve upon in a similar way.
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