It is interesting to see that Andrew S. Tanenbaum released this letter to the public (probably to show that he was not directly involved in deploying Minix to all those chips), while saying that he is okay with the closed source nature, as long as there are good reasons to do so (to prevent causing any problems for him and for the person who made the decision at Intel).
Hey Andrew, if you have no problem with Minix running as a spy OS inside everybody's computer, please make that clear and write:
"I appreciate Intel's use of my work to potentially backdoor everyone's systems and am proud to have had such a huge impact on the world. If it helps to keep Minix being the most used OS in the world, I hereby grant everybody (not just Intel) to use me and my work without any restriction under the terms of the BSD license."
That whole letter is about how much better the BSD license is than the GPL. If Minux would have been GPLd Intel would have had to open source the ME and therefore didn't use e.g. Linux.
I have not particular Problem with the BSD license (I use it myself sometimes) but give the facts that since years hackers are trying to convince Intel and AMD to relase their ME/PSP source code [1] (to safe us all from deeply infectable hardawre and unrestricted surveillance), I find it disgusting how Tanenbaum uses the situation to drive the discussion towards BSD vs. GPL and how right he was that the BSD provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users.
In my opinion he should have said something like he knows that the BSD license also grants Intel the right to use it for whatever they want, but given the magnitude of the technological impact he supports the public interest to open source the ME and asks AMD to do the same with their PSP.
That way he could have used his role as the Minix inventor for the sake of transparency.
I don't think that Tanenbaum has any responsibility whatsoever to make that request.
The question about ME is totally, 100% orthogonal to the fact that it uses MINIX, and I'd go further and argue that this is sort of the point – releasing code as BSD is an explicit acceptance that it may be used in ways that one disagrees with.
"Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision and a separate issue from the code it runs."
Hey Andrew, if you have no problem with Minix running as a spy OS inside everybody's computer, please make that clear and write:
"I appreciate Intel's use of my work to potentially backdoor everyone's systems and am proud to have had such a huge impact on the world. If it helps to keep Minix being the most used OS in the world, I hereby grant everybody (not just Intel) to use me and my work without any restriction under the terms of the BSD license."