An Open Letter to Intel
cs.vu.nl
cs.vu.nl
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.
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 worked out, he should have chosen a different license. For example the MIT license requires the copyright and license to be included in distributions.
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 folks to do just that.
* 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.
[0]: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...
One of my libraries with BSD 3-clause license was used in a U.S. government project. It did require particular hardware and couldn't really be deployed by any random user but they honored the mention clause without any prodding on my part.
My Bosch kitchen appliances came with a whole bunch of software licenses for embedded subsystems, even GPL ones. So it seems actual lawyers in a huge international corporation decided it constitutes distribution.
I suppose you could make the argument that the OEMs are the ones distributing the binaries, but they are out there.
> http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=faq&s[]=license#what_is_t...
you can read:
"What is the MINIX 3 license?
The MINIX 3 license is a clone of the Berkeley (BSD) license. In plain English, it says you can do whatever you like with the system provided that (1) you agree not to sue us under any conditions, and (2) you keep the credit lines in the source, documentation, and publicity unless other arrangements have been made. Specifically, you are free to modify the source code, redistribute it, incorporate it into commercial products with only the above restrictions."
Note the passage "unless other arrangements have been made". I am pretty sure Intel made such an agreement with the MINIX 3 developers for this reason.
Also, my guess is this is part "security through obscurity", part Intel not wanting everyone to know that they used someone else's code for its chips' firmware.
Beyond the valid complaint of this being a personal insult, that is.
> 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.
Tanenbaum: 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.
> MHO if he has a problem with the way things worked out, he should have chosen a different license.
Tanenbaum: I don't mind, of course, and was not expecting any kind of payment since that is not required. There isn't even any suggestion in the license that it would be appreciated.
Tanenbaum: The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.
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All in all, I think Tanenbaum's open letter is partly an exercise in self promotion and partly venting a little frustration that his work has gone uncredited given the scale of its deployment. I might be reading between the lines a little here but I also wonder if he's venting little because he dislikes nature of this particular deployment:
Tanenbaum: 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.
if so i don't begrudge that, as it's not like intel was saying much about it. :P
Companies using such projects should be more courteous, if only to encourage more of such licenses...
> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
This is weaker than what is in a BSD license:
> 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.
That is, BSD license explicitly requires copyright attribution for binaries, while MIT does not.
I wrote in
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15651860
that the MINIX 3 developers openly say in their FAQ that different agreements with them are possible. I would bet such an agreement exists - I don't believe Intel's lawyers would have tolerated such a legal liability.
> I don't mind, of course, and was not expecting any kind of payment since that is not required. There isn't even any suggestion in the license that it would be appreciated.
> The only thing that would have been nice is that after the project had been finished and the chip deployed, that someone from Intel would have told me, just as a courtesy, that MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers. That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.
> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users. If they want to publicize what they have done, fine. By all means, do so. If there are good reasons not to release the modfied code, that's fine with me, too.
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...
I think the reason he posts this is that, just like everybody else, he's not happy about Intel secretly introducing a massive security hole in their processors. Telling him they were using Minix on such a massive scale would have been polite, but it would also have informed Tanenbaum that Intel was running a secret OS on their processors.
What Intel did was not only foolish and harmful, it was also impolite. Plenty of people are addressing the foolish and harmful parts already, but the impolite part can only really be addressed by AST.
Forgive me for interjecting politics into this debate, but we all know at this point that there is at least one highly successful egotist in this world who still needs to have his ego stroked on a regular (daily) basis. I admire Tanenbaum and doubt that he fits into this category, but the category does exist.
"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."
"if you arent 25 years old proverbial "javascript developer" ;-)"
Why is this necessary?
[this comment was written in Lynx]
I'm sure A.Tannenbaum is flattered (and duly so, Minix 3 is very interesting) but I'm feeling he's patting himself on the back here.
You have a legal and ethical responsibility to the creator of the work, not to whomever put it in your feed.
Of course, we should credit our grade school teachers each time we do arithmetic - Thanks, Mrs. Ashliman!
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.
I'm sorry, but I don't feel free because of that.
What I see is that I have proprietary code I never saw, never vetted and which I don't (and shouldn't) trust that's running on all my computers (not all, but you can get it) and that I don't have the freedom to remove, examine, modify or replace. There are already a lot of blobs that aren't audited by anyone outside their manufacturers running a lot of basic functionality on my computers. I don't need another blob running on god mode on my CPUs.
So, no. The use of the BSD license here is harming everyone but Intel. Hopefully, we can make it harm Intel if we make it clear (with our purchasing power) it is not cool to force us to run software we don't trust. It only serves to show that the BSD license preserves the freedom of the developers and packagers AT THE EXPENSE of the users.
That Intel uses this software for a purpose you disagree with is immaterial to this discussion. Had MINIX not been available under a permissive license, Intel would have found some other (but presumably more expensive) way to largely achieve the same thing. They did not come up with and implement the management engine because MINIX was BSD licensed.
We are not a first party in that transaction, but feel very much the consequences. Therefore it does involves others. Most actions have an influence on others and therefore there are responsibilities for the consequences.
If you sell lower quality concrete to a building company which builds a dam that break and kills many people, then you have blood on your hands and should be treated as such, even though you were not a first party in the dam construction.
> That Intel uses this software for a purpose you disagree with is immaterial to this discussion.
It is very much not immaterial. It _might_ be legally irrelevant, but it is not without importance.
> Had MINIX not been available under a permissive license, Intel would have found some other (but presumably more expensive) way to largely achieve the same thing. They did not come up with and implement the management engine because MINIX was BSD licensed.
I hope they need to spend a lot of money and energy and effort for taking others freedom away. The cheaper it is for them, the more likely they do it.
It may feel good to have a target to direct anger at, but it's not the right target and it's counterproductive. Free software, including that under the BSD license, has made computing vastly safer.
You have to at least stop and wonder whether that's true, though.
Your point of view and their point of view are both valid.
Unfortunately, both of you can be right, and we all have to live with that ambiguity.
"not party to that transaction" and "immaterial to this discussion" have no place here, we're discussing an open letter and we're free to evaluate his position however we feel. If the author wanted to have a private conversation with Intel he was free to do so.
You are trusting the CPU to do what you ask it to do. If intel were to do something shady, they wouldn't need a un-vetted blob of code to do it, they could do it directy in the CPU itself.
I guess my point is that you have to trust the CPU manufacturer, whether they have this code or not.
I certainly trust Intel way less than before some of the more fishy details about the Intel ME got out.
That little Quark core has access to pretty much everything.
BTW, I'd love to use it to collect very low level performance data on the main CPU.
For a hardware company, the GPL just isn't that much of a competitive disadvantage, since most of the software is written to work with their hardware.
Which they did and if there was no alternative, they would develop 100% of it in secret. I think this is the opposite of great.
By calling them "users" and saying "users have freedom" you are conflating things needlessly.
We are the users here. We severely lack freedom. (Thanks BSD!)
Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough that merely having his work be "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" justifies everything? And then he uses that to argue that BSD is superior to GPL because this way big companies can use the code without giving anything back? Great success.
I think the Hacker News crowd is just a little baffled because there are some conflicting emotions on display from Dr. T here. Conflicting emotions are a very human thing to have, and are guaranteed to confuse the engineer crowd.
1. He's glad Minix is useful to others
2. He's slightly hurt that Intel repeatedly asked him for help (which he provided) but never bothered to thank him or even let him know the purpose of their inquiries. ("That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.")
3. He admits that his choice of license permits this behavior, so he (slightly grudgingly) accepts their choice ("If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users")
#3. It does offer the maximum freedom to some potential users, but no responsibilities to extend those freedoms to others. In my opinion this is why the GPL truly extends the maximum amount of freedom to everyone, users, lusers, abusers, and just plain old hackers.
The BSD license used by MINIX 3 requires attribution:
> http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=faq&s[]=license#what_is_t...
"The MINIX 3 license is a clone of the Berkeley (BSD) license. In plain English, it says you can do whatever you like with the system provided that (1) you agree not to sue us under any conditions, and (2) you keep the credit lines in the source, documentation, and publicity unless other arrangements have been made. Specifically, you are free to modify the source code, redistribute it, incorporate it into commercial products with only the above restrictions."
They should throw a donation of $1M his way. Even at that rate, it is a massive steal.
As to Prof Tanenbaum's style, if I'm feeling a teeny bit uncharitable, I'd say this is perfectly in keeping.
Since the infamous exchange between Linus and him where he came off as being a bit condescending, a lot of his writing on that subject has given the strong impression that he grudgingly accepts that Linux "won" but that it's somewhat of a travesty. And that winning means that it's the OS of choice in billions of devices.
What I read from this statement is that he now feels like it's not so clear cut and he's somewhat vindicated. He's just a bit miffed that no-one told him earlier.
> Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough
I don't think this is ego so much as professional pride. Linux is the architectural antithesis of Minix and that definite rankles. But more positively, he and his students worked hard (and took quite a lot of money) to make Minix 3. He wants it to be used.
I have no idea whether or not he's privately concerned about the way this has been used. But it wouldn't surprise me that he's hopeful that it will raise the profile of Minix and get folk to consider it more seriously.
You already hint at this, but I would expect that it is more about what that quantity represents (obviously you cannot really untangle these things).
For example, it speaks for itself that number of users has a direct influence on to the number of developers and computer scientists working on the system and improving it. Or from Tanenbaum's point of view, fix issues that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
I read this as, for want of a better word, snarky.
I'd bet if it wasn't Minix, L4 would have been on the cards. That's another microkernel that runs in coprocessors like your phone's radios that probably nobody will ever mention out loud.
The only thing that works from the celeb side is to power through and intently turn the conversation back onto the fan. But that requires genuine interest that you may not have the energy for, and it may not be what _they_ are there for either. There is a reason comic con actors charge for autographs: it's a very light weight form of prostitution.
Fans are genuinely annoying. They break every social rule, and come with a one way sense of familiarity only possible through modern technology, which our primate brain is poorly equipped for.
Still I do see as important to actually get to know the people behind the words.
He's talking about publishing code. The BSD license explicitly requires including the license somewhere (anywhere, really).
At the same time, I'm sure he's totally aware that Intel wouldn't have told him anyway, because they meant to keep this secret, and AST is rubbing it in that their secrecy is not only deceptive to their customers, but also making them impolite to the creator of the OS they use. Presenting that impoliteness as the bigger problem is probably a joke.
He does make it clear at the bottom that he's not at all happy with how Minix has been used here. He's also aware that it's not illegal, but that doesn't mean it's not impolite. Towards him, certainly, but of course also to the end user.
He's probably serious about about the Berkeley license being superior, even if it means people use his work for things he doesn't approve of. His comment about Minix being the biggest OS in the world is a bit of ironic vindication, I think. I don't think it's actually true, considering how much Linux runs on ARM chips, and indeed many PCs use AMD chips, but it's a good joke, and nobody is going to take that opportunity away from him.
He's definitely serious about microkernels being superior. I don't doubt he wants to see that as the real reason why Intel chose Minix.
I have no idea how accurate my assessment is, though. It's been about 20 years since I followed his lectures, and never had any kind of personal talk with him.
It is completely earnest in the sense that he is not expecting any money from it. Likewise he has never expected anything from Linus Torvald when MINIX was used as the primary source of inspiration for the Linux kernel when he started out with it. Although they did have some pretty serious discussions about it, but nothing more than that.
He wrote an open letter just to tell everyone his OS is the most widely used in the world - even though he didn't need to, because 20 news outlets already did that job for him - and that he wants recognition. Of course it's ego. But he may not need to 'justify' it because he may not give a crap either way.
BSD is my go-to license for my own code so I have no prejudice against it. That being said if some company contacted me about some of my code, asked me to do some modifications for free then used it to power a module that many people consider user-hostile and probable backdoor while not giving anything back, be it code, money or credit I don't think I'd write a blog post saying how happy I am that my code is so successful and how it proves that BSD is so much better than GPL.
It's one thing to say "the code is BSD, there's nothing wrong about what they did", it's an other thing to say "thank you Mr Intel for using my code without giving anything back, I just wish you had told me earlier so that I could have thanked you before!" which is frankly what this open letter sounds like to me.
are you arguing that we aren't all poorer with an unmodifiable black box running in our CPUs ?
I think you missed the point, or I didn't convey it correctly.
I am not talking from the point of view of a third party, but rather that of the author of the original software.
If somebody uses my software and improves it, then it’s only fair that I get to see the changes.
That’s why AGPL 3 is the license of choice for my code.
Some piece of code that also cost time (and possibly someone's else money) to develop, and that they got for free?
Also note that many of that time, energy and money to modify GPL code is not just programming time, but also a lot of legal advice time. With BSD-like license it should be immediately clear what you can do with the code (i.e. almost everything).
We spent thousands of dollars on legal advice when deploying GPL. In the end it was largely as we expected it to be: No significant action was needed beyond releasing the code to the components that we already got for free, with the minor modifications we had made. But we had to be sure before we committed to using GPL code.
Today, we have a blanket "yes you can" policy for BSD code while GPL is still on a case by case basis.
Yes, that may not hold up in court if it is a tiny non-essential fragment or, if you revert to old code soon, etc. but that’s not the point; if you end up in court, you already lost.
With BSD-licensed code, that risk is way smaller. The worst you have to do is add a few (or quite a few thousand. Go check Setting/General/About/Legal for an example) attribution lines to the versions of your code that use the BSD-licensed code.
(Also, even if you choose to license your code under the GPL, you have to track licensing, as it isn’t legally possible to combine GPL2 and GPLv3 or APGL and GPLv3 licenses or any GPL with ApAchexlicensed code in a single binary. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html. If you want to troll GPL aficionados, license your code under GPLv1)
My personal opinion is that it's because the term 'a work' which is used liberally in GPL is a legal term and can potentially be interpreted quite broadly. This means that we have to ensure - every time - that what we do does not constitute 'a work' which derives from GPL code - in the legal sense - if we do not want to distribute the source code that we create.
With BSD we don't have to go through that process because it will not result in us losing control over our own software. We just need to stick a disclaimer in a license file and we're done.
Well, a random developer can't simply assert it - you need lawyers to make sure you really are conforming to the GPL. With BSD, you don't. This is simply the ground reality.
Deploying GPL code is only a legal process if you make it one.
If you're using it to write or deploy other GPL software, it's pretty much a straight forward affair. And if you're not using a GPL license, well, that's your problem: there's nothing stopping you from using the GPL to make all the hassle go away.
That part is often significantly simpler with BSD which is why it's significantly easier to just allow BSD and have a case-by-case basis for GPL.
The GPL does require some extra work, but it's on the technical side, to make sure you're shipping all the source that you need to ship.
The reason for consulting with a lawyer was to ensure that we didn't do anything wrong which would later require us to open up source code that we didn't want to open up.
To take a example, I often see LGPLv3 in big AAA games. I also see licenses that say "we asked the developer in a email and received special permission". Game studies seems to happy spend legal advice time if it saves them developer time, and from where I stand it seems to be a clear competitive advantage to do so. The only licenses they don't use is those that conflict with their core business model.
Finally MINIX is more popular that Linux! Never mind that it's being used as a backdoor.
You're thanking someone because you relicensed your hard work so they can use it for free (BSD) and you complied?
All for the stated reason that they don't have to relicense their work to other people so they could use it for free?
/facepalm
It's like some version of the Stockholm syndrome, deserves a name.
The freedom debate is unending. Personally I am very skeptical of all forms of economic freedom, as frequently they have the result of pidgeonholing people and their freedom is restricted.
And he formulated this after he had some hard earned experiences with suppliers at MIT.
Listen, I understand why that ideology is appealing, particularly if you haven't seen it play out before. How many "successful" open source projects have you seen whinge and struggle and eventually be abandoned and collapse, due to their lack of sustainability? All the while scrambling to offer the most permissive license possible? Even projects that shoulder entire ecosystems!
It's better when the costs and assumptions are above board: better for the project, better for the users.
I'm not familiar with the MINIX project, they've clearly found a way to stay sustainable if they've been around for 17 years. Just that paragraph quoted by OP struck me as very odd as well.
Just pay your dues rather than see your favourite project die. Businesses understand this. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" offers some initial thrill but is not long-term sustainable.
Yes, I do have a problem understanding why people work for free.
I don't see cops working for free, or bankers, or chip designers, or the guy who served my dinner working for free. Even Andrew doesn't work for free.
I can understand licensing software that was built or purchased using [socialist] tax dollars under the GPL for moral reasons, but I don't understand why I have to pay Andrew to help Intel maintain their competitive (size) advantage.
I have a problem with Tanenbaum claiming that having Intel ask him to work for free then taking his work to implement a hardware backdoor without giving anything back (not even credit) is somehow a great thing and a proof that BSD is superior to the GPL. And that only because it means that he can say that MINIX is somehow "most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers", which, I guess, is kind of technically right. Somebody should send him a t-shirt or something.
I license my code with BSD because "I don't care what you do with it", mostly. I won't write a thank you note if some of my code ends up in some closed source product, especially something as shady as Intel's ME. And I definitely wouldn't knowingly do custom work for a company as big as Intel for free.
...and create backbox systems with backdoors that no user has the freedom to inspect, change or disable :-)
In practise, seeing ME as a competitive advantage is something that's at least questionable.
I'm surprised how much difficulty some people have in understanding that others might make different licensing choices. If I license software under a BSD/MIT-like license, it's not an accident – it's specifically done so that there are as few restrictions on that software as possible.
Don't get me wrong – the GPL is important and making the choice to license under it is a totally legitimate personal choice with various pros and cons versus a BSD license. But it's not the only rational choice to make, and I wish you'd be a bit more open-minded about that.
Well, maybe only if you think 17 is "several years":
> several years ago when one of your engineering teams contacted me
> we put MINIX 3 out under the Berkeley license in 2000
As such wider acceptance is something to celebrate. It might also be a (partial) vindication that an alternative design you absolutely hate and tried to kill is a huge success and is everywhere from supercomputers to cell phones.
That sounds like an argument against open sharing of source code and ideas.
Interesting conclusion, considering one of the "features" of the Intel ME is precisely to limit what the final user can do with their computer.
The BSD license advocates have always considered other developers to be the "users" and even offer the freedom to deny the same freedom to those who run their software. GPL considers all those who run the software to be the users and tries to maximize their freedom. In the case of Intel ME it's not clear who the code is serving, but it's definitely not the person using the computer.
And perhaps they have no interest in doing good in the world. In that case, they can all go to hell.
I wonder how Tanenbaum feels about all that.
When googling, I only found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3wclk6/even_...
"If A wouldn't, then B would" is a weird argument imho. It's basically equivalent to saying "If we can't destroy C in one blow, there's no point in attacking them".
Although in this case, his opinion of ME seems pretty neutral.
I've never seen a source on the net where anybody claimed that ME limits their work with the computer they own. Any references? ME offers some additional management features at enterprise level, but where does it block things ?
The backdoor aspect is true, either from three-letter agencies or for corporate locked-down machines
"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."
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
Ideally, bugging computers is a legislative issue, and the contract between the vendor of the particular technology employed to do it (in this case not even particularly built for that purpose) and its user is irrelevant.
Particularly if it’s potentially used against us, citizens.
I specifically did not suggest "looking the other way" either, I just don't think the problem is open source operating system software that anyone can benefit from, it's involuntary surveillance, and I think that should be addressed legislatively rather than inhibiting publicly available research on very broadly applicable subjects.
Conversely, you could look at other research like the microchip, GPS and the Internet, all publicly funded to fulfill some defense purpose, and all having more than occasionally been used for indiscriminate surveillance. Would we be better off without these things? I don't necessarily assume a "no" to that, but it is fair to say that there are plenty of uses of these technologies that have had positive effects on society.
The Berkeley license gives software publishers (which are not users) maximum amount of freedom.
As an actual X86 user who cannot remove or change this unwanted piece of code running on my machine, I politely disagree about the freedom given to me.
One of the early users of MINIX was Linus Torvalds. He began modifying MINIX to add new features that he thought were needed. Over a period of time he had modified almost everything and launched it as a new operating system, Linux. It is fairly safe to say that had I not written MINIX there would have been no Linux.
The design principles Tanenbaum applied to MINIX greatly influenced the design decisions Linus Torvalds applied in the creation of the Linux kernel.[citation needed] Torvalds used and appreciated MINIX,[17] [...] Early Linux kernel development was done on a MINIX host system, which led to Linux inheriting various features from MINIX, such as the MINIX file system.
Hilarious...
Is that provable? :)
* Linux in all variants running in billions of VMs and Containers.
* Android.
* There are not only Intel chips out there.
So Kudos to Dr. Tanenbaum but adding all numbers I don't think we have Minix nearly as much deployed as Linux ;)
"MINIX 3 was now probably the most widely used operating system in the world on x86 computers"
(emphasis mine)
The stable NDK APIs are not Linux specific, ANSI C and C++ libraries are OS agnostic, and as of Android 8 the syscalls are white listed.
And Android can finally throw out its biggest chunk of meaningfully open-source source-code so far (from an end-user/modder perspective).
At that point Android is not going to be meaningfully open any more, and might as well be considered a closed platform on par with iOS.
I wonder how/if that will impact the platforms popularity.
> I wonder how/if that will impact the platforms popularity.
It won't. Vast majority of users don't care about open source, and developers won't have to care. The kernel and userland get replaced, but the underlying Android OS (excluding GApps) remains open source.
I assume you're referring to the Java based frameworks and Dalvik/ART runtime pieces, but I would usually consider those part of userland, and your comment is a little unclear.
When that happens Intel might as well have replaced MINIX in the ME.
Intel telling him about it at some point would have been polite.
Intel has paid one billion to AMD to settle a law suit. I wouldn't expect a company which doesn't refrain from illegal activities to be polite.
Nonsense; the GPL does not require that one's competitors receive code, but rather one's users. It further requires that one may not prevent them from giving the code to others, with the same rights.
Thanks to the BSD, Intel's users are unable to patch, modify or extend the hardware & software they have bought.
> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.
I think that I've demonstrated that the freedom has not accrued to users but rather to Intel.
What's stopping an Intel competitor from also being a user? Am I wrong that all it would take is for an Intel competitor to buy an x86 computer with an Intel processor and then demand the source code? If that's the case, then it hardly seems like nonsense to me.
I very much doubt that there's more (modern) Intel CPUs in the wild than there's say android devices (not containing Intel CPUs).
I guess that by "computer" he means "desktop".
I'm pretty sure he does.
https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html
I wonder how drh would feel about it.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of...
I find it incredible how ~ast can consider the intel ME to be achieving "the maximum amount of freedom" to potential users. He even criticises it in the very next paragraph.
More generally, I find it incredible how people can view the attempts (by copyleft) to restrict the freedom to restrict others, as attacks on freedom.
Hey Andrew, if you have no problem with Minix running as a spy OS inside everybody's computer, please make that clear and write:
"I appreciate Intel's use of my work to potentially backdoor everyone's systems and am proud to have had such a huge impact on the world. If it helps to keep Minix being the most used OS in the world, I hereby grant everybody (not just Intel) to use me and my work without any restriction under the terms of the BSD license."
There is no reason that MINIX could not have been used in the ME even if it were GPLd, for example…
I have not particular Problem with the BSD license (I use it myself sometimes) but give the facts that since years hackers are trying to convince Intel and AMD to relase their ME/PSP source code [1] (to safe us all from deeply infectable hardawre and unrestricted surveillance), I find it disgusting how Tanenbaum uses the situation to drive the discussion towards BSD vs. GPL and how right he was that the BSD provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.
In my opinion he should have said something like he knows that the BSD license also grants Intel the right to use it for whatever they want, but given the magnitude of the technological impact he supports the public interest to open source the ME and asks AMD to do the same with their PSP.
That way he could have used his role as the Minix inventor for the sake of transparency.
[1] Top question here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/5x4hxu/we_are_amd_crea...
The question about ME is totally, 100% orthogonal to the fact that it uses MINIX, and I'd go further and argue that this is sort of the point – releasing code as BSD is an explicit acceptance that it may be used in ways that one disagrees with.
There's definitely a reason against it if we're talking about GPLv3.
The binary was scrambled. You don't do that if you plan to release the source.
"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."
That should be one hell of a fast computer
> MINIX 3 is a free, open-source, operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure. It is based on a tiny microkernel running in kernel mode with the rest of the operating system running as a number of isolated, protected, processes in user mode. It runs on x86 and ARM CPUs, is compatible with NetBSD, and runs thousands of NetBSD packages.[1]
Something about this [2] made me feel bad for the author, I can't imagine building software for a few decades, getting excited about a conference and then no one submitting any papers.
[2] > Unfortunately, the MINIXCon 2017 conference had to be cancelled due to the small number of talks submitted
Beside this... I think it is important that this would not have happened if Minix was licensed under the GPL. Not this way, at least. Intel would have had to find another OS (possibly paying for it) or develop one ex-novo (again, paying for it). So it would have happened anyway, but at least it would have been much more expensive for Intel.
It is not a license problem. Nor Mr. Tanenbaum position on "being glad" of MINIX being used on billions of x86 computers. Intel hiding code on all chips is the problem. Intel opening backdoors (maybe not intentionally, due to bugs) is the problem. Not being able to easily disable or update this code is the problem.
If it wasn't the MINIX, Intel would use something else. If there wasn't, they would write their own OS for it.
Ever since I first heard of the Management Engine, and of the various problems this thing raises, I found it curious that Intel remained so quiet about it.
I can think of two plausible explanations: a) They do not want to draw any more attention to this issue and are pulling a "reverse Streisand", if you will. If so, there could be several reasons for them to act this way. Or, b), they just don't care enough.
The BSD licence that MINIX 3 uses actually requires giving credit:
Copyright (c) 1987, 1997, 2006, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands All rights reserved. Redistribution and use of the MINIX 3 operating system in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
[...]
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.
[...]
Source: https://github.com/Stichting-MINIX-Research-Foundation/minix...
Is he implying that he chose that license specifically because Intel asked for it ?
He claims that that license is the most user-friendly since it gives the user the most freedom, which is true in that case, but he's missing the point, when the FSF and other GPL proponents mention user freedom they talk about the end user freedom, the one at the end of the chain that will have to use the software (i.e. anyone who purchased a semi-recent Intel chip). When considering the user community as a whole, it is clear that they globally get less value from the project since changes don't have to (and don't) get contributed back and they can't make changes to the software that they are using.
Seems very short-sighted to claim a win here when the only 2 parties that benefit are Intel and Tanenbaum's ego.
What happened to them. Is there anyone out there with an x86 IP license that could build a super simple P3 or P4 class chip?
Which is what sarcasm does :)
> If you have a modern Intel CPU (released in the last few years) with Intel’s Management Engine built in, you’ve got another complete operating system running that you might not have had any clue was in there: MINIX.
That's different from Mr. Tannenbaum's claim:
> 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.
What about all of the AMD system, or the systems that were built before IME 11 (or that just don't have it)?
> Currently, we support the following chipsets regardless of your system manufacturer or the motherboard in your PC:
> Intel® Q57/H57/H55/P55 Express Chipset
> Mobile Intel® QM57/QS57/HM57/HM55/PM55 Express Chipsets
The wording is sufficiently vague that I can't be 100% sure about it.
All that aside, Intel did exactly what the license allows them to do. The license doesn't require a thank you note.
If it makes HN feel any better, Intel is among the leading contributors to Linux, and MANY other open source projects. Intel doesn't expect a thank you note for it
Freedom in this case should refer to "freedom what to do with the code" not freedom as in personal liberty, which is what libre/GPL software is usually about. So it's more like how the smartphones OEMs and carriers are "free" to modify and lock-down the Android OS as much as they want.
No word about the elephant in the room?
- Being the kernel of ChromeOS and Android, not accessible to majority of userspace and easily replaceable by anything else (e.g. Fuchsia).
- Lost to macOS and Windows on the desktop
It only won on the server room, and now it runs under Minix supervision.
If it's so easy, why hasn't it happen yet?
Linux comes mostly for free, Fuchsia is still not mature enough and is 100% on Google's budget.
However and this is what I always raise up to people rejoicing about Linux on Android, using official Android images, there is very little Linux exposed to application writers.
The Java Frameworks are naturally kernel agnostic, and the NDK APIs are quite constrained, with the main goal of being used to implement Java native methods or bring in C or C++ code into Android.
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis.html
https://developer.android.com/ndk/reference/index.html
Anything else just isn't allowed and might kill the app as of Android 7.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2016/06/android-ch...
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/07/seccomp-fi...
Hence why Termux needs to emulate many Linux behaviors.
More than that Personal satisfaction would be unimaginable given the magnitude of deployment.
Obviously ammuters with non CS backgrounds can't be expected to know Who-is-Who of CS history. Even if I knew him, how often people explicitly find out the author of the articl? On mobile screen?