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I don't have any problem with that. I have a problem with Tanenbaum claiming that having Intel ask him to work for free then taking his work to implement a har

by simias 9y ago

I don't have any problem with that. 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.

Wintamute 9y ago
Intel didn't ask him to work for free, read the letter again.
- loopbit 9y ago
  Without getting into the licence discussion: > [...]your engineering teams contacted me about some secret internal project and asked a large number of technical questions[...]. > [...]your engineers began asking me to make a number of changes[...] Those are two cases where Intel asked Tanenbaum to work for free. First as consultant and then implementing custom code modifications. Yes, not many people will charge for answering questions and maybe he thought that the changes requested by the Intel engineers were appropriate and useful for the project itself, but the fact remains that this work was valuable to Intel and required Tanenbaum to spend time on it. Edit: Formatting
  - Wintamute 9y ago
    I think it's debatable whether being contacted for information or asked to make changes to your open source project is "working for free". It's being asked to work on open source software, there's a difference.

by simias 9y ago

Wintamute 9y ago

Intel didn't ask him to work for free, read the letter again.

loopbit 9y ago
Without getting into the licence discussion: > [...]your engineering teams contacted me about some secret internal project and asked a large number of technical questions[...]. > [...]your engineers began asking me to make a number of changes[...] Those are two cases where Intel asked Tanenbaum to work for free. First as consultant and then implementing custom code modifications. Yes, not many people will charge for answering questions and maybe he thought that the changes requested by the Intel engineers were appropriate and useful for the project itself, but the fact remains that this work was valuable to Intel and required Tanenbaum to spend time on it. Edit: Formatting
- Wintamute 9y ago
  I think it's debatable whether being contacted for information or asked to make changes to your open source project is "working for free". It's being asked to work on open source software, there's a difference.