"I have run across this before, when companies have told me that they hate the GPL because they are not keen on spending a lot of time, energy, and money modifying some piece of code, only to be required to give it to their competitors for free. These discussions were why we put MINIX 3 out under the Berkeley license in 2000 (after prying it loose from my publisher)."
Nowhere does it say that discussions with Intel in particular motivated the license change away from the GPL. Only discussions with unnamed corporations as long ago as 2000.
My point is that you are drawing odd/bad conclusions from a misreading of the information contained in the letter.
> You're thanking someone because they asked you to relicense your hard work so they can use it for free (BSD) and you complied?
Nowhere in the letter does it imply that the entity being thanked (Intel) is the same entity that motivated the author to change the license.
Intel used open source software according to the license they found it with. The author is pleased his software is powering global infrastructure, and is likely pleased he's contributed to human progress, but is slightly peeved he received no personal thank you as a matter of politeness/etiquette. I'm struggling to understand what criticism you have for this process. No-one has been dicked.
