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

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.

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 :-)

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.