Nope, because they wouldn't use it then. I am not sure why people think the GPL had so much leverage over larger companies that will just build something in house.
But large companies use quite a bit of GPL software. I'm checked my phone, my PVR, my car media system and proprietary GPS I have and all of them have an open source license document that includes some GPL code.
For a hardware company, the GPL just isn't that much of a competitive disadvantage, since most of the software is written to work with their hardware.
Please convince Nvidia of that. Their closed source drivers are a major hindrance in the Linux community. They keep them closed because they feel the driver source would reveal additional details about their hardware, giving up some of their advantage over competitors.
I'm not sure why they used Minix at all. Surely Intel has enough expertise to build a custom OS that does exactly what they need and nothing else? That would have been easier to control for them, and it would have prevented this Minix-related news, which adds only more attention to something they'd have preferred to keep quiet.
Good. At least it will cost them to develop in-house. Raising the expense of doing user-hostile things is one way to dissuade companies from doing them.
