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Comment by unixhero | Hacker News Reader

The reason is probably that enthusiasm died out when Intel used it for their covert management engine in every x86 cpu they sell. Essentially bavkdooring all computers in the world...

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Should've used GPL...

Then no one would be using it at all and Intel would pick the next OS project to use.

That is what enterprises said about Linux.

But the network effects are too strong and the GPL requiring the source code for drivers to be released increases the network effects. Unlike permissive licenses.

Busybox is still overwhelmed suing companies repeatably ignoring the GPL.

That's a different usecase. Linux is good for general computing. Intel specifically wanted something they could close down as much as possible.

So if Minix was under GPL, Intel would probably have gone with NetBSD or FreeBSD. Or possibly something different altogether.

L4 is popular among similar corporate trojan malware deployed in secret against customers. Most of its use is by qualcom. Apparently apple are doing something similar.

This large scale deployment is apparently billed by some as the payoff for the promise of microkernels w.r.t. "security" so I guess they just don't mean yours?

I presume the point of the OP comment is that Intel ME is bad malware, and that its creation could have been prevented by making Minix GPL. Intel could have quite easily used just about any project, and there are plenty that are permissively licensed, or they could have just created one from scratch if needed.

The Software Freedom Conservancy is filing the lawsuits, IIRC.

Android's toybox emerged when Rob Landley, the main busybox developer, left the busybox project because of the lawsuits.

Toybox uses a BSD license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toybox

Um wat

Probably refers to [1]

1 - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/google-removing-minix-mana...

Yup. If I'm not mistaken it also made a big push for libreboot and other projects to circumvent or disable as much of it as possible.

Purism laptops being a commercial venture to have modern hardware.

Then there's vendors repurposing older Thinkpads packaged with libreboot or coreboot.

The Intel CPU/microOS inside of a CPU while cool and even cooler that Minix was used for it, was unfortunately not very transparent for security/paranoid conscious persons.

This site breaks the back button on mobile. It inserts a page to the stack, and it seems under certain conditions that page breaks the link back to this thread. It happened to me after reading the entire article, but not when I tried without reading the article.

Oof. It moves to a "more stories to see before you go" panel. Lose a lot of respect for Tom's Hardware for that.

Hard to believe.

Not hard to believe for me: https://itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/

Hard for me to believe that that's what killed the enthusiasm.

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. I certainly hope Intel did thorough security hardening and testing before deploying the chip, since apparently an older version of MINIX was used. Older versions were primarily for education and newer ones were for high availability. Military-grade security was never a goal.

Second note added later: The online discussion got completely sidetracked from my original points as noted above. For the record, I would like to state that when Intel contacted me, they didn't say what they were working on. Companies rarely talk about future products without NDAs. I figured it was a new Ethernet chip or graphics chip or something like that. If I had suspected they might be building a spy engine, I certainly wouldn't have cooperated, even though all they wanted was reducing the memory footprint (= chip area for them). I think creating George Orwell's 1984 is an extremely bad idea, even if Orwell was off by about 30 years. People should have complete control over their own computers, not Intel and not the government. In the U.S. the Fourth Amendment makes it very clear that the government is forbidden from searching anyone's property without a search warrant. Many other countries have privacy laws that are in the same spirit. Putting a possible spy in every computer is a terrible development.

Source: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

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