On Thu, 9 Nov 2017 10:07:19 -0500 John Newman wrote:

Tannenbaum's open letter to Intel is also a good read:

not seeing much of value there - I would have expected a principled and scathing attack on the biggest fascist chip manufacturer on the plaenet and their 'management engine' but there is onli one line in a post script. also, the fact that motherfucking intel gets to 'save' money by using free stuff isn't exactly good news either. last but not least, at some point it's quite ridiculous for open source advocates to give weapons to their enemies.

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

On Thu, 9 Nov 2017 12:19:45 -0500 John Newman wrote:

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also, the fact that motherfucking intel gets to 'save' money by using free stuff isn't exactly good news either.

last but not least, at some point it's quite ridiculous for open source advocates to give weapons to their enemies.

Minix is BSD-licensed, so anyone can take it and do what they will with it. I guess you're advocating for GPL only in open source stuff? I can see both sides of the argument...

well it's a dilemma. I don't think 'intellectual property' is justified or enforceable at all. But that in turn means that good ideas can be used by all sorts of hardly-human scum. As to 'legal' licences in the american fascist, I mean, 'legal' system they are just bullshit written by lawyers. GPL relies on 'copyright' doesn't it.

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http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

On Thu, 09 Nov 2017 13:36:44 -0500 John Newman wrote:

On November 9, 2017 1:16:02 PM EST, juan wrote:

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On Thu, 9 Nov 2017 12:19:45 -0500 John Newman wrote:

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also, the fact that motherfucking intel gets to 'save' money by using free stuff isn't exactly good news either.

last but not least, at some point it's quite ridiculous for open source advocates to give weapons to their enemies.

Minix is BSD-licensed, so anyone can take it and do what they will with it. I guess you're advocating for GPL only in open source stuff? I can see both sides of the argument...

well it's a dilemma. I don't think 'intellectual property' is justified or enforceable at all. But that in turn means that good ideas can be used by all sorts of hardly-human scum.

As to 'legal' licences in the american fascist, I mean, 'legal' system they are just bullshit written by lawyers. GPL relies on 'copyright' doesn't it.

Right - which is why I personally prefer BSD licensed stuff, seems to come closer to doing away with the whole notion of copyright.

yeah - then again, using copyright to limit the damage caused by copyright and to put material in some sort of public domain might seem like a valid compromise. But what happens when the copyright term expires? Well, argually that's not a problem since copyright now lasts 140 fucking years average...oops.

But it can obviously have negative side effects, as we see, when the state, or corporations, build on these efforts for their nefarious purposes... Not sure there's a good solution here. Except of course for the utter destruction of the state ;)

pretty much...

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http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:07:19AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:02:05AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

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It's funny looking back at the ancient flame war between Tannenbaum & Torvalds... and now it turns out there is a copy of Minix running at ring -3 in every Intel CPU out there! Sweet fucking christmas.

Slashdot coverage:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/11/07/1041236/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip...

Is minix so better than some BSD? AFAICT it has much lesser user base and is less tested. And why google chose the linux kernel for android? The BSD license allows closing the source.

On Nov 11, 2017, at 5:16 AM, John Newman wrote:

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 09:38:45AM +0200, Georgi Guninski wrote:

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On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:07:19AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

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On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 10:02:05AM -0500, John Newman wrote:

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It's funny looking back at the ancient flame war between Tannenbaum & Torvalds... and now it turns out there is a copy of Minix running at ring -3 in every Intel CPU out there! Sweet fucking christmas.

Slashdot coverage:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/11/07/1041236/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip...

Is minix so better than some BSD? AFAICT it has much lesser user base and is less tested.

I imagine Intel chose Minix because its so much smaller than BSD. I don't have LOC numbers in front of me, but I'm guessing its at least an order of magnitude smaller... perfectly sized (and licensed) for their fucked up purposes.

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And why google chose the linux kernel for android? The BSD license allows closing the source.

I guess they're trying to "do no evil" lol. The whole point seems to be to get away from the BSD license, so that users can have the source to the various binary blobs doing fuck-knows-what on their CPUs…

I misread this question as relating to the Google presentation on replacing Minix in your Intel CPU with Linux… not android! Whoops. As to Android… Linux probably had much better ARM support than *BSD when Google chose it for Android. Definitely a lot more developers. And they don’t seem to care about keeping most of Android open source, which is why you there are so many good, different, ROMS to choose from for your android phone (generally, depending on the model).. from cyanogenmod, to whatever else :) Anyway, I’m just speculating on the above. Maybe it also comes back to their purported “do no evil” bullshit - they wanted to get on the open source bandwagon.

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-- GPG fingerprint: 17FD 615A D20D AFE8 B3E4 C9D2 E324 20BE D47A 78C7

On Nov 11, 2017, at 9:31 AM, Georgi Guninski wrote:

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On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 06:09:45AM -0500, John Newman wrote: Anyway, I’m just speculating on the above. Maybe it also comes back to their purported “do no evil” bullshit - they wanted to get on the open source bandwagon.

Do you mean "do know evil"? The pronunciation is essentially the same, just different zpelling.

That’s why i characterized it as “purported” and “bullshit”.

On Thu, Nov 09, 2017 at 04:18:28PM +0000, Ben Tasker wrote:

On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 3:02 PM, John Newman wrote:

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It's funny looking back at the ancient flame war between Tannenbaum & Torvalds... and now it turns out there is a copy of Minix running at ring -3 in every Intel CPU out there! Sweet fucking christmas.

If I remember rightly, though, in that flame war he also criticised Linux for running on x86 as it was a dead (or perhaps he said short-lived) platform that no-one would be running in future (wasn't it MIPS he thought would dominate?). So there's also a certain irony to the architecture that Minix is now (effectively) the most dominant OS on.

Yeah, as I recall there was a lot of speculation that people would be running GNU HURD on their SPARCs (or other RISC processors) in the "near future"... :) Which of course never happened.

-- Ben Tasker https://www.bentasker.co.uk