Hacker News Reader

Comment by arximboldi | Hacker News Reader

> If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.

Interesting conclusion, considering one of the "features" of the Intel ME is precisely to limit what the final user can do with their computer.

View on HN

>> 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.

In that case, BSD license advocates are delusional if they think their license does any good in the world. BSD-licensed code is charity for the ultra-rich, plain and simple.

And perhaps they have no interest in doing good in the world. In that case, they can all go to hell.

Yes. And it also allows others (e.g. the three-letter agencies) to spy on the user.

I wonder how Tanenbaum feels about all that.

If Minix's license wouldn't be BSD, they would use some other BSD licensed OS or develop it's own...

Earlier versions of ME (the one with an ARC core) used ThreadX RTOS --- proprietary, commercially licensed. I guess Intel eliminated a huge chunk of those licensing costs by moving to x86+Minix instead.

Which in a way it is better also for end users. At least we don't have to pay the license for a software that we don't want to run on our computer :-)

Does this argument have a name? "If I didn't do [SOME HORRIBLE THING X], someone else would, so I might as well do it myself?"

When googling, I only found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3wclk6/even_...

Bad phrasing. The argument is more like "If [this awesome thing X] wasn't available, people would have to find a maybe-less-than-desirable alternative." The name for it is practicality.

They chose Minix, so it seems reasonable to assume that Minix was the best option. If Minix would not have been BSD, they would have had to choose a worse option or spend significant money to build their own OS. Both options would have cut into ME's budget and might have reduced its capabilities.

"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".

> might have reduced its capabilities

And security and many other things. Surely you aren't arguing that an even more closed environment is ideal just because of a minor budget spend for a large company.

I suppose it could be somewhat like a nuclear physicist seeing his work contributing to the development of nuclear weapons.

Although in this case, his opinion of ME seems pretty neutral.

> to limit what the final user can do with their computer

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 ?

Does it? I think the DRM aspect is managed somewhere else

The backdoor aspect is true, either from three-letter agencies or for corporate locked-down machines

Reply on news.ycombinator.com