MINIX Creator Pens Open Letter To Intel After ME News

[Guest]

Recently, we reported on Google’s work to remove Intel Management Engine (ME)--an obscured, MINIX-based OS running as firmware--from its Intel CPUs. It turns out that MINIX's creator wasn’t aware that his OS had been commercialized by Intel.

MINIX Creator Pens Open Letter To Intel After ME News : Read more

 

[bit_user]

software with the BSD license can be used, royalty and recognition-free, to create closed-source derivatives.

Oh, come on! Where did you even read that?

Recognition is a standard and important part of the BSD license. From the very license of MINIX, itself:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

* 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.

* Neither the name of the Vrije Universiteit nor the names of the
software authors or contributors may be used to endorse or promote
products derived from this software without specific prior written
permission.

* Any deviations from these conditions require written permission
from the copyright holder in advance

Source: http://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=minix.git;a=blob_plain;f=LICENSE;hb=HEAD

And that file (as of right now) hasn't been touched since 2010: http://git.minix3.org/index.cgi?p=m...9efa5f44dc93086bc34e7c95f10ed55b6401f;hb=HEAD

Tanenbaum isn’t looking for money from Intel

That decision was made when he released it as open source. That said, many big companies understand they have an enlightened self-interest in supporting those open source projects on which they depend, via donations, contributions, and programs like GSoC. Even so, it would be shameful to beg, and he probably doesn't need financial support.

In light of that, this:

one of your engineering teams contacted me about some secret internal project and asked a large number of technical questions about MINIX, which I was happy to answer. I got another clue when your engineers began asking me to make a number of changes to MINIX

is particularly lame. The least they could've done was do the work themselves and submit patches. If I were the maintainer, I'd have told them I'd consider patches they submit but no way would I do free work for Intel (perhaps with exceptions for requests that I'd already really wanted to do - sounds like most of these probably weren't).

 

[photonboy]

He should have been PAID since they consulted him. He could have signed an NDA, but "asking" a guy who creates the OS that is inside your CPU to make changes is very strange... heck, he may have had good ideas for SECURITY CHANGES had he known it was a potential back door into Intel systems.