An Open Letter to Intel

The courtesy they owe is to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, the /creator/ of the work they are using, not to some individual who happened to blog about it.

But for the GPL, the notion of a user almost always includes you and me. Or at least it would, it this particular case.

So how can one compare the licenses on the amount of "freedom" conveyed to "potential users" if they don't want to use the same meaning of the word "user" as the GPL does? And does purposefully, with the end goal of serving said users.

> You can at best call me a user in the sense that I may be using nginx or apache when I access a website.

Not sure about "at best", but I can. And there are licenses (such as AGPL) that limit what one can do with software accessed over a network as well.

> I certainly can't operate the MINIX derivative running on a different CPU than the software I actually do use. I never made a conscious effort to start or stop it, in fact I didn't know about it until the other day.

You never "start or stop" an operating system, you just push a button. You don't interact with it directly either: you communicate with hardware devices and user-facing software.

Most users don't even know what operating system they are running, they just spend their day in their web browser. And they don't know the difference between the two.

And yet, that doesn't matter to the GPL.

> Maybe he's sincerely proud that his software is now so widely deployed?

Sure, but that was a separate statement. And then: "... this bit of news reaffirms my view...".

> It seems beside the points I am making.

I am discussing the Open Letter, and not your opinion in a vacuum.

I agree that free software would have been the better option, but the fact remains that MINIX is BSD licensed, not what the FSF considers "free software" and I am merely describing what user freedom could possibly mean in terms of the BSD license. Maybe you feel like discussing the merits of different licenses, which leads me to believe that you are confusing this with me somehow sharing an opinion on which is better.

The BSD license doesn't really express the notion of a user. You and I are free to distribute, modify and use the software under the same terms that Intel does. Compared to GPL, there's no fundamentally conflicting idea of what a user is. The difference is in what obligations the licensee has.

> So how can one compare the licenses on the amount of "freedom" conveyed to "potential users" if they don't want to use the same meaning of the word "user" as the GPL does? And does purposefully, with the end goal of serving said users.

Tanenbaum considers Intel to be a user of his software and that they benefit from the freedom granted to them by the license. If you want better information than my take on what exactly he means you should ask him, not me.

Also, you – a potential user – are free to do whatever you want with MINIX.

> Not sure about "at best", but I can. And there are licenses (such as AGPL) that limit what one can do with software accessed over a network as well.

OK, so we agree that you can. For all I care there can be licenses that limit at what times a week I can pick my nose based on the proprietor's notion of what a user is.

> You never "start or stop" an operating system, you just push a button. You don't interact with it directly either: you communicate with hardware devices and user-facing software.

There is a very wide span in which you could place the definition of a "user" if you are willing to reduce the concept to this level of absurdity. Maybe it was a bad idea to bring the subjective notion of a user up at all, since the BSD license is after all very clear on what it permits and under what circumstances.

> I am discussing the Open Letter, and not your opinion in a vacuum.

Explain your point rather than ask me what I think that he means. You can discuss whatever you feel like, of course, but don't expect me to be your soapbox for ranting about how superior GPL is. I don't have the energy to engage in some sort of socratic exchange where you slowly try to pull your point out of me. There is a reasonable interpretation of "free" for which the BSD license may be considered to offer more freedom to users than the GPL. Most importantly, it comes with less obligations. There is also a very reasonable interpretation of "free" for which the tables are reversed. Tanenbaum obviously favors the former.