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.
