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> Per the GPL, they publish sources for their modified MINIX, and every person who runs Intel hardware gets a copy of the source for MINIX, but not for the sepa
by calcifer 9y ago
> Per the GPL, they publish sources for their modified MINIX, and every person who runs Intel hardware gets a copy of the source for MINIX, but not for the separate daemon, which Intel doesn't need to GPL.
Actually, there is still controversy surrounding this since there has never been a GPL court case about what exactly counts as a derivative work. There are similiar concerns around proprietary Linux modules that interface with GPL'd kernel interfaces.
> What license could he have used that would have prevented the thing Intel did?
He could have chosen the JSON approach to licensing [0].
[0] http://www.json.org/license.html http://www.json.org/license.html
- eesmith 9y agoI believe akerl_ means "separate daemon" in about the same way that an Oracle database server runs on top of the Linux kernel. There is no code sharing (outside of permitted uses of header files), so copyright is not involved, so there is no GPL issue. That is, the "separate daemon" really is separate from the kernel.
- akerl_ 9y agoAs eesmith suspected, I'm referring to a service running on top of the MINIX kernel, similarly to Apache running on any of the thousands of Linux servers out there. I'd say if one day the courts decided that Apache running on Linux had to be GPL'd by nature of being a derivative work, we'd experience so many fundamental issues with so many projects that Intel ME would barely register on the list.