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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) by Bot on Wednesday November 08 2017, @11:34PM (3 children)
I think he referred to users of the license itself, that is devs modifying the software under the terms of the license. End users or any downstream tinkerer are SOL. That is considered a freedom by Tanenbaum. You have the freedom to close up your modifications. Which is BS, because then an even freer license is the following: "to use or modify this software you agree to award me, the creator, all your money and the jus primae noctis". It's quite a lot of freedom, granted to the creator only.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 09 2017, @08:32AM (2 children)
But those are developers. Users are the ones that get shafted by this - and everyone else closing up open code.
Calling developers "users" is an insult to developers, and pretending that the "freedom to make software closed source" gives freedom to users is an insult to users.
To pretend that the BSD license gives more freedom than the GPL, you either have to dishonest like a Bill Gates era Microsoft shill, or be so religiously pro-BSD that you fail to see the weaknesses of the license (such as the BSD guy (I think it was Theo) who complained that Linux developers would incorporate BSD code into Linux, slapping the GPL on it, while not acknowledging that the BSD license specifically allows this, and if they wanted more control about what developers can do with the code they should have used the GPL in the first place).
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday November 09 2017, @03:33PM
The BSD license's purpose is to maximize freedom for the developers; the GPL's purpose is to maximize freedom for the users, although it also makes it easier for users to develop with it in the process.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 10 2017, @05:17AM