I can't tell if this is earnest or 2nd degree. Can people more familiar with Mr Tanenbaum's style enlighten me?
Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough that merely having his work be "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" justifies everything? And then he uses that to argue that BSD is superior to GPL because this way big companies can use the code without giving anything back? Great success.
I think the Hacker News crowd is just a little baffled because there are some conflicting emotions on display from Dr. T here. Conflicting emotions are a very human thing to have, and are guaranteed to confuse the engineer crowd.
1. He's glad Minix is useful to others
2. He's slightly hurt that Intel repeatedly asked him for help (which he provided) but never bothered to thank him or even let him know the purpose of their inquiries. ("That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.")
3. He admits that his choice of license permits this behavior, so he (slightly grudgingly) accepts their choice ("If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users")
#2. Exactly, seems to me an academic kind of thing, he helped them a lot, a little attribution would not have hurt, and the lawyers could have easily been told to pipe down.
#3. It does offer the maximum freedom to some potential users, but no responsibilities to extend those freedoms to others. In my opinion this is why the GPL truly extends the maximum amount of freedom to everyone, users, lusers, abusers, and just plain old hackers.
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#2. Exactly, seems to me an academic kind of thing, he helped them a lot, a little attribution would not have hurt, and the lawyers could have easily been told to pipe down.
The BSD license used by MINIX 3 requires attribution:
"The MINIX 3 license is a clone of the Berkeley (BSD) license. In plain English, it says you can do whatever you like with the system provided that (1) you agree not to sue us under any conditions, and (2) you keep the credit lines in the source, documentation, and publicity unless other arrangements have been made. Specifically, you are free to modify the source code, redistribute it, incorporate it into commercial products with only the above restrictions."
Hackers have problems understanding this kind of "vanity issues" (I also openly admit that I have difficulties).
I am not aware that Intel gave any credit that is visible to the end-users of their processors (otherwise I would surely have seen it, since my laptop has a Skylake processor - so it uses MINIX 3). I am also not aware that my laptop included a leaflet that mentioned MINIX 3 somewhere.
So my assumption rather is that Intel's lawyers reached an agreement with the license holders of MINIX 3 that they don't have to give credit (which is perfectly fine - even the quote in my parent post mentions this possibility). But if they did such an agreement they said that it is perfectly fine to them (in particular for Andrew S. Tanenbaum) that Intel does not credit them publicly. I thus consider it as rather unfair to complain when such an agreement exists, because one typically does not demand such an agreement if one plans to credit them nevertheless.
So I rather believe what happened is this: Intel came to the MINIX 3 developers to get them to sign such an agreement, which allows Intel not to give attribution. Andrew S. Tanenbaum signed it, because it sounded too good to be true and gave MINIX 3 some very renowned key customer. But he did not consider that this might put MINIX 3 into very common use without any users being aware of it. So he "suddenly" realized the loophole of this agreement and now considers himself treated unfairly.
I think he would of appreciated some type of compensation from Intel given its massive usage by a massive company. Not even a small thank you donation. It is sort of shitty on Intel's part to not compensate him at all and also they got a large number of questions/support from him.
They should throw a donation of $1M his way. Even at that rate, it is a massive steal.
Yes, that's how I interpreted the joke about the license's failure to mention the appreciation of payment. Chump change to Intel is a big deal to an individual.
Not sure about earnest but I'd be very surprised if it wasn't sincere.
As to Prof Tanenbaum's style, if I'm feeling a teeny bit uncharitable, I'd say this is perfectly in keeping.
Since the infamous exchange between Linus and him where he came off as being a bit condescending, a lot of his writing on that subject has given the strong impression that he grudgingly accepts that Linux "won" but that it's somewhat of a travesty. And that winning means that it's the OS of choice in billions of devices.
What I read from this statement is that he now feels like it's not so clear cut and he's somewhat vindicated. He's just a bit miffed that no-one told him earlier.
> Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough
I don't think this is ego so much as professional pride. Linux is the architectural antithesis of Minix and that definite rankles. But more positively, he and his students worked hard (and took quite a lot of money) to make Minix 3. He wants it to be used.
I have no idea whether or not he's privately concerned about the way this has been used. But it wouldn't surprise me that he's hopeful that it will raise the profile of Minix and get folk to consider it more seriously.
> And that winning means that it's the OS of choice in billions of devices.
You already hint at this, but I would expect that it is more about what that quantity represents (obviously you cannot really untangle these things).
For example, it speaks for itself that number of users has a direct influence on to the number of developers and computer scientists working on the system and improving it. Or from Tanenbaum's point of view, fix issues that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
He was my prof. This is clearly his style, he is being earnest. Also, this has been the address of his web site ever since the web started. Also see his later added note: Many people don't like the idea of the management engine in there at all, but that is a separate issue from the code it runs.
(Edit: removed silly comment about a personal interaction. The letter has also had addendums making the intent more clear. I will add "shut up on the internet" to the list of things I've learnt from the author)
I read this as, for want of a better word, snarky.
I'd bet if it wasn't Minix, L4 would have been on the cards. That's another microkernel that runs in coprocessors like your phone's radios that probably nobody will ever mention out loud.
Having been on both sides of the equation: imagine if a complete stranger acts like they are your friend, even though you've never met them, and offers nothing in the way of reciprocal ice breaking. Now repeat this dozens of times and bias it towards the socially inept and spergy.
The only thing that works from the celeb side is to power through and intently turn the conversation back onto the fan. But that requires genuine interest that you may not have the energy for, and it may not be what _they_ are there for either. There is a reason comic con actors charge for autographs: it's a very light weight form of prostitution.
Fans are genuinely annoying. They break every social rule, and come with a one way sense of familiarity only possible through modern technology, which our primate brain is poorly equipped for.
Don't have heroes. Don't put people on a pedestal. People have flaws, quirks, and failures. Admire good people for the good that they do, despite their flaws.
Snarky? Yeah, in a way. Honestly he just seems a little hurt that they didn't extend the courtesy of letting him know what they were going. But at the end he admits that he's the one who picked that license.
It's a bit of both I think. Tanenbaum absolutely has a sense of humour, but it's a fairly dry wit. In this particular case, I'm certain he would have honestly prefered to have been informed. It's nice to know when people use something you're giving away on such a large scale. There's certainly some professional pride in that.
At the same time, I'm sure he's totally aware that Intel wouldn't have told him anyway, because they meant to keep this secret, and AST is rubbing it in that their secrecy is not only deceptive to their customers, but also making them impolite to the creator of the OS they use. Presenting that impoliteness as the bigger problem is probably a joke.
He does make it clear at the bottom that he's not at all happy with how Minix has been used here. He's also aware that it's not illegal, but that doesn't mean it's not impolite. Towards him, certainly, but of course also to the end user.
He's probably serious about about the Berkeley license being superior, even if it means people use his work for things he doesn't approve of. His comment about Minix being the biggest OS in the world is a bit of ironic vindication, I think. I don't think it's actually true, considering how much Linux runs on ARM chips, and indeed many PCs use AMD chips, but it's a good joke, and nobody is going to take that opportunity away from him.
He's definitely serious about microkernels being superior. I don't doubt he wants to see that as the real reason why Intel chose Minix.
I have no idea how accurate my assessment is, though. It's been about 20 years since I followed his lectures, and never had any kind of personal talk with him.
This is earnest in that he would have liked someone from Intel to tell them.
It is completely earnest in the sense that he is not expecting any money from it. Likewise he has never expected anything from Linus Torvald when MINIX was used as the primary source of inspiration for the Linux kernel when he started out with it. Although they did have some pretty serious discussions about it, but nothing more than that.
> Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough that merely having his work be "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" justifies everything?
He wrote an open letter just to tell everyone his OS is the most widely used in the world - even though he didn't need to, because 20 news outlets already did that job for him - and that he wants recognition. Of course it's ego. But he may not need to 'justify' it because he may not give a crap either way.
andrew tanenbaum wrote the operating systems design and implementation book (amongst others) which is widely used in computer science programs around the world, i don't think he gains anything by not being earnest.
It depends I think on a few things; one, finance. I think he's making plenty of money with his books and his career at the university, so I don't think that's a problem for him. Two, morals. If Minix was used in e.g. ballistic missiles (which it might just be) I'm sure he'd have objections - even if there's nothing he could legally do about it due to the license, as acknowledged in this letter too.
Of course it's earnest. If it wasn't he wouldn't have picked the BSD license, which rejects the notion that you're poorer today than yesterday just because someone started using some software you wrote.
The notion of the GPL is that end users are poorer if they don't have source available and can't fix bugs in the code they're using. Intel ME, meaning people are running systems with exploitable vulnerabilities that they can't fix, is one of the clearest arguments in favour of it.
One can also fix bugs without source code available (it is just harder). The Intel ME's problem rather is that one perhaps can fix bugs, but not upload the bug fixes back to the chip because of the required signature.
Both those things are problems (it's possible to work around the signature issue, but it makes it a lot harder, just as with not having source code). And both are addressed by the GPLv3.
It's not my point and that's the type of discussion I explicitly tried to avoid.
BSD is my go-to license for my own code so I have no prejudice against it. That being said if some company contacted me about some of my code, asked me to do some modifications for free then used it to power a module that many people consider user-hostile and probable backdoor while not giving anything back, be it code, money or credit I don't think I'd write a blog post saying how happy I am that my code is so successful and how it proves that BSD is so much better than GPL.
It's one thing to say "the code is BSD, there's nothing wrong about what they did", it's an other thing to say "thank you Mr Intel for using my code without giving anything back, I just wish you had told me earlier so that I could have thanked you before!" which is frankly what this open letter sounds like to me.
Arguably, the box could be even blacker were a large company to feel like they had no implementation to turn to and forced to develop everything internally.
It’s not about money. Intel has improved the software, by making it more modular, but kept that improvement for themselves. That’s the problem with BSD IMHO.
That's not a problem. You are not entitled to the work of others. And the original bsdl code is just as available to you as it was to them for you to improve upon in a similar way.
Because if this is earnest I'm quite seriously baffled. I don't mind BSD at all and I won't comment on the political side of things but why on earth would you rejoice that you worked for free (I assume?) for Intel only to have your work end up in some user-hostile module forced on the users? Is Tanenbaum egotistical enough that merely having his work be "the most widely used computer operating system in the world" justifies everything? And then he uses that to argue that BSD is superior to GPL because this way big companies can use the code without giving anything back? Great success.