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Professor Andrew S. Tanenbaum from the Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam wrote "An Open Letter to Intel" regarding Intel's use of MINIX 3 to run the Intel Management Engine (video) built into their processors:
Thanks for putting a version of MINIX 3 inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press report about it. Also here and here and here and here and here (in Dutch), and a bunch of other places.
[...] Note added later: Some people have pointed out online that if MINIX had a GPL license, Intel might not have used it since then it would have had to publish the modifications to the code. Maybe yes, maybe no, but the modifications were no doubt technical issues involving which mode processes run in, etc. My understanding, however, is that the small size and modular microkernel structure were the primary attractions. 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. A company as big as Intel could obviously write its own OS if it had to. My point is that big companies with lots of resources and expertise sometimes use microkernels, especially in embedded systems. The L4 microkernel has been running inside smartphone chips for years.
Professor Tanenbaum did the initial design and development of MINIX, a microkernel used primarily for teaching. He has helped guide it through the years as a small community around it has grown. Lately it has adopted much of the NetBSD userspace. The IME is a full operating system system running inside x86 computers. It gets run before whatever system on the actual hard disk even starts booting.
Related: Intel Management Engine Partially Defeated
EFF: Intel's Management Engine is a Security Hazard
Disabling Intel ME 11 Via Undocumented Mode
How-To: Disabling the Intel Management Engine
Positive Technologies - Learn and Secure : Intel ME: The Way of Static Analysis (takyon: I marked this one to not display at the time since it was a blog post from April and ran within hours of the preceding IME story.)
Purism Disables Intel Management Engine on Librem Laptops
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @09:35PM (2 children)
Wait, did Intel break a license as simple as BSD one? All they had to do is put the required text in the documents! No source distribution, just attribution.
It's 3 clauses with a leading and ending extra paragraphs, the point that matters is:
"2. 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."
https://minix1.woodhull.com/faq/mxlicense.html [woodhull.com] if you want to see what was posted to newsgroup in 2000.
Maybe Tannenbaum could sue, if he really cares about ME as he says latter (after being pointed by others...), as they didn't comply with the license and are thus infringing his IP. Oops, he can't, it should be Prentice Hall! So big company saved some money and final users got the stick. And Andy got his 10 minutes of fame just because someone else hacked the system and tried to get rid of most of it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 08 2017, @11:34PM
It is possibly Intel violated the license, yes. Although the link listed here http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=faq#what_is_the_minix_3_license [minix3.org] goes to a 404 page, there's a license in here http://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=minix.git;a=blob_plain;f=LICENSE;hb=HEAD [minix3.org] which seems to require attribution for binary redistribution. I can't tell if that's the current license, however, because there are a bunch of other places to look http://git.minix3.org/index.cgi [minix3.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @01:41AM
OPSEC trumps copyright concerns.