One of the most widespread OS in the world that is not Linux
Posted by RevolutionaryHigh@reddit | linux | View on Reddit | 85 comments
And it's creator made zero on it
https://www.cs.vu.nl/\~ast/intel/
This is an open letter from Andrew Tanenbaum, MINIX’s creator and one of Linus Torvalds’ teachers. TLDR, Intel took MINIX and used it inside Intel ME, the hidden black box running below the OS layer that can monitor and control your PC. They even asked Tanenbaum to make adjustments beforehand so it would better fit their needs.
And what did they give him in return? NOTHING! Not even a thank you. No acknowledgment, no compensation, nothing. Yes, the license allowed them to use it that way, but the whole thing feels cold, cynical, and deeply dehumanizing. Perfect example of how corporations will take everything they can and give back as little as possible, in this case absolutely nothing.
lukasbradley@reddit
> Andrew Tanenbaum, MINIX’s creator and one of Linus Torvalds’ teachers
Tanenbaum was not one of this teachers.
that-gay-boy@reddit
I see your point, though I think Tanenbaum was a teacher of Linus' in an indirect sense.
Linus never took any classes with Tanenbaum or anything like that, but Tanenbaum's textbook was a pivotal turning point for Linus. He writes such in his autobiography:
I was eager to work with Unix by experimenting with what I was learning in Andrew Tanenbaum's book, excited about all the things I could explore if I had a 386 PC.
-Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun, p. 53
Linus even tried to get his copy of the textbook signed, despite the public "flamefest" between himself and Tanenbaum.
I think it's probably safe to say that Linus would consider Tanenbaum a teacher of his.
mcvos@reddit
An inspiration, sure, but if learning from his book makes him your teacher, then Tannenbaum is the teacher of nearly every computer scientist in the world.
BookFinderBot@reddit
Operating Systems Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Albert S. Woodhull
I'm a bot, built by your friendly reddit developers at /r/ProgrammingPals. Reply to any comment with /u/BookFinderBot - I'll reply with book information. Remove me from replies here. If I have made a mistake, accept my apology.
Ybalrid@reddit
If you want another shocking revelation: The PS4 and PS5 are running a derivate of FreeBSD.
Remote-Combination28@reddit
He chose how to license it.
sacheie@reddit
He made a choice not to use the GPL.
LurkingDevloper@reddit
That's why the MIT/BSD licenses exist. You're basically saying, "I hope this is useful to someone, good luck!"
I don't imagine he really had any hard feelings about it, given he'd tried to commercialize it to very little success for over a decade.
daemonpenguin@reddit
There wouldn't be any difference in the outcome if he had used GPL. The GP does not require companies to pay for software or send thank-you notes.
AvonMustang@reddit
They would have had to release the source code though to anyone who bought an Intel CPU with it…
daemonpenguin@reddit
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but the source code for MINIX is already publicly available. Anyone can download it whenever they want. Intel wouldn't need to do anything other than point customers who specifically requested the code to the MINIX website.
abag0fchips@reddit
Look up what the GPL license actually does before making your next comment.
ABotelho23@reddit
He's not exactly wrong. GPL doesn't say you have to preemptively provide the code, just that the modifications must be provided if requested for people for whom you've shipped binaries.
abag0fchips@reddit
But he doesn't seem to understand that derivative works of code that is GPL licensed need to have a GPL compatible license themselves. And also he's being an asshole.
ABotelho23@reddit
I get the impression that they believe Intel hasn't modified Minix. In which case they'd be right; without modification, you can just send the user/customer upstream.
Alles_@reddit
Ofc they modified it lmao, or was minix created to run on any Intel CPU even future ones from the begging
ABotelho23@reddit
Yea, obviously.
QuaternionsRoll@reddit
GPLv3 also requires the ability to modify the installation (anti-Tivoization).
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
You just showed you have no idea what the GPL license actually states. Derivations (such as ME) would also need to be source available, not just the "MINIX parts", but the entire work as a whole
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
They would've just used a different kernel with a license that allowed them not to do that then
RealModeX86@reddit
Yeah, NetBSD perhaps
deja_geek@reddit
I suspect Intel wouldn’t have used MINIX if it was GPL licensed.
CardOk755@reddit
Minix is actually under a no commercial use license.
He didn't make "nothing" from it. He sold it to Intel for millions.
Content_Chemistry_44@reddit
That is what happens. That software can have a proprietary fork, if not GPL.
SpeedDaemon1969@reddit
I'm sure that AST made plenty in royalties off his"Modern Operating Systems" book, and Minix when it was an extra-cost purchase on top of the book. It never was a big seller then as a stand-alone OS. And Linux runs on a lot more things than just PC computers, so I have doubts about the most-used claim.
dst1980@reddit
Since IME runs on every Intel CPU regardless of user-facing OS starting when Intel started including IME in the CPU, the claim is feasible. It is true that Intel is not the CPU powerhouse it used to be, but it is still very extensively used. The challenge is basically which is more common: non-Intel Linux systems or non-Linux Intel systems.
With Intel having had a stranglehold on data centers for many years, Windows servers become a key factor. Many businesses will have at least a few Windows servers to handle domain access control, Exchange email, and MSSQL databases.
SpeedDaemon1969@reddit
My understanding is that Minix only runs on the Quark SoC on the Intel motherboard chipset, not on each and every x64 CPU. Certainly not on AMD ones, and I assume that there are still non-Intel chipsets for Intel CPUs. Regardless, ME only has one user, doesn't it? Even if you count every single Intel employee from CEO to janitor, I'd think many large data centers would have more users overall.
When I wrote that, I was only thinking of the embedded market, which uses old x86 architecture going back to 386 in new and old products. For sheer numbers, there must be more of those powering all sorts of home and industrial controllers. Sadly I must guess, because the only "current" figures I got were from 2035. Gotta love AI hallucinations...
jimmyhoke@reddit
GPL3 or it could happen to you too.
surreal3561@reddit
People shouldn’t release things under certain licenses if they don’t agree with the terms of the license and what it allows others (including large corporations) to do.
LousyMeatStew@reddit
When Theo de Raadt and his team made OpenSSH, they consciously released it under the same 3BSD license they were using for OpenBSD because they wanted companies to "steal" it. In their mind, it was better if a company like Cisco just used OpenSSH without ever contributing back rather than relying on Cisco to come up with a secure SSH implementation on their own.
Sometimes, the reason for using a permissive license is driven by practical desires rather than philosophical ones. I technically agree that the world would be better if OpenSSH was GPL'd and Cisco was a responsible member of the FOSS community but I'm inclined to believe this is more fantasy than reality.
Desertcow@reddit
The software environment is also a lot different today than it was in the 90s. Maintaining a proprietary fork of open source software that is getting continuously updated is hard, and companies are far more willing to upstream changes they made that don't give them a competitive advantage just to make their lives easier with updates. While permissive licenses do allow companies to take and lock down your code without sharing anything, its a lot less common nowadays than it was in the 90s
LousyMeatStew@reddit
That's an understatement. In the 90s, open source software was still predominantly developed using a closed development model. A big part of why Linux took off was because new devs were welcome to contribute. esr complained about this when we wrote CatB in 1997 and that's the same year when EGCS forked from GCC.
The 2000s was when a lot of open source projects started to switch models with Linus releasing Git in 2005 and GitHub becoming a thing a few years later.
"upstream changes" as a concept just didn't exist back then.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
100%. This is what people don't think about when they see a project licensed permissively. The idea is that it can be used as a dependency, even for closed source software. Companies "stealing" an open, well-maintained software as a dependency means safer software for everyone
LousyMeatStew@reddit
Even with GPL, you have exceptions like
[Linux-syscall-note](https://spdx.org/licenses/Linux-syscall-note.html)and[GCC-exception-2.0](https://spdx.org/licenses/GCC-exception-2.0.html)that are there to deal with the practical realities of dealing with the private sector.No-Dentist-1645@reddit
Sure, that's the "in between" approach I mentioned for LGPL, it allows dynamic linking without license infection. But even those have limitations: in this specific example of a microkernel, you can't just modify everything you need to change via dynamic linking or syscalls.
cac2573@reddit
So many open source software projects do this. Use permissive license, it gets abused, surprised pikachu face.
Latest one I saw is teslamate
lazyplayboy@reddit
It's not abuse if the project is used within the terms of the licence.
Middlewarian@reddit
As a SaaS proponent for decades, I've been saying things like: I'm glad I have some open-source code but I'm glad it's not all I have.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
The author is perfectly happy with how things turned out tho. The initial post is slightly misleading since it implies the author was pissed that he didn't receive any monetary support, but in reality he wrote an open letter thanking Intel, with the only "complaint" being:
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
So yeah, a lot of people releasing software with open licenses are aware of what it means and don't expect it to be something other than what it is
CardOk755@reddit
You are "slightly" underestimating how Tannenbaum feels. He's a academic, a scientist.
Use without attribution is not illegal.
It is worse.
It is impolite.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
Of course, that's the complaint I made sure to clarify. It wouldn't have cost Intel anything to properly credit and inform Tannenbaum, I didn't mean to say Intel did no wrong, they could've done that as a bare minimum
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
Most of the outrage about "corporate abuse of open-source" comes from unrelated bystanders, not from the authors themselves.
Just like the rest of society, being outraged on behalf of people who don't care (or who aren't woke enough to understand that they're being abused) is what we're all about as humans, baby!
linuxhiker@reddit
Yep, from "community advocates".
It's ridiculous.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
Absolutely true, so many times I see licenses discussions online it's "the MIT license means people can use your code inside closed source and not open it!" Which yeah, is 100% the intention.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love it as much as anyone else if we lived in a world where every single line of code ever written was fully open source and available to everyone. But that's just not the world we live in, closed source still makes up an important slice of all software infrastructure, and it still needs to be safe and well maintained.
freexe@reddit
That was always the genius of Stallman. Using the licencing system as the tool for open source. You had all the control, but also the responsibility to use the correct license
CardOk755@reddit
Tannenbaum originally released Minix under a license that said you could use it if you bought a physical copy of his book.
That is why Linux exists, Linus started playing with Minix but wrote Linux because the Minix license was so restrictive. (The EXT series of filesystems are "extensions" of the Minix filesystem).
Tannenbaum then got into a huge multi year fight with the publisher because he wanted Minix to be a teaching tool, eventually releasing it under a BSD license.
Microsoft needed a small os to hide in their chips, but if the used a GPL OS they would have to let people modify it, so they picked Minix.
Tannenbaum is right. Intel did nothing "wrong". They are just impolite. Parvenues. Nekulturni. Minable.
Poor show Intel. Poor show.
zinozAreNazis@reddit
I release everything nowadays under AGPL
Middlewarian@reddit
Since 1999 I've been developing a proprietary but free-to-use C++ code generation service. I've been warning people about open-source being too naive. Only a few people have remembered the Alamo though. If you stand up for yourself more than the AGPL, you will get a lot of cold shoulders and hard elbows.
__konrad@reddit
BSD is "Schrödinger's license" - the code can be both free/open source and proprietary/closed at the same time ;)
No-Consequence-1863@reddit
I think the author of Minix is fine with it. Or else he would not have released the software in the terms he did.
KasanesTetos@reddit
That's what you get with a cuck license.
Schlonzig@reddit
Just another proof that the Berkeley license is not "more free", since it allows corporations to just gobble up everything.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
It quite literally is "more free" by that definition. Companies can use it in a way that suits them. Tannenbaum chose the Berkeley license specifically because of this, as noted in his open letter.
mf864@reddit
It depends on what freedom you are talking about and care about. GPL doesn't protect freedom to use software however you see similar to public domain. The freedom GPL protects is the freedom to view and modify the source code of anything anybody builds on top of a GPL licensed piece of software.
But in terms of freedom like public domain, a license like MIT is a much more free license because it has no restrictions.
deja_geek@reddit
The GPL gives freedom to the end user, BSD gives freedom to the Developer. It may be shocking to you, but there are a number of open source developers who prefer something other than the GPL. There a some developers who feel the GPL (especially GPL v3) is to forceful with its terms.
1Hzdigicomp@reddit
In the linked page, the author disagrees. He supports the freedom to gobble. As long as he chose his license carefully, and he seems to have, then I think that's OK.
shponglespore@reddit
When I release stuff it's usually under a permissive license precisely because I want people like me to be able to use it at work without jumping through oops to satisfy their company's legal department.
natermer@reddit
I don't think he is upset about it.
whattteva@reddit
I'd say FreeBSD is likely next after that, and not Linux. It runs on Juniper firewalls, F5 load balancers, Cisco AsyncOS, ixSystem's TrueNAS CORE, Sony PlayStation, WindRiver vxWorks (which is used in all kinds of mission-critical avionics), Apple iOS/MacOS.
Now that I've written this, BSD may actually be the world's most widely used/forked.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
I know this is a fun trivia fact that freebsd shills love to latch onto, but the only freebsd bits in macos are some userland utilities.
ronaldtrip@reddit
It seems that when software has one line of BSD code, it is now considered a BSD. So Windows and Linux are BSD too.
whattteva@reddit
And what's wrong with that? The point is, they borrow a lot of the code?
_FunkyKoval_@reddit
FreeBSD is a BSD based system, but bot every BSD is a FreeBSD. Also, Wind River vxWorks is not a BSD variant.
whattteva@reddit
Who saod it was a variant? They use a lot of the network stack.
pejotbe@reddit
Were you born yesterday?
couch_crowd_rabbit@reddit
Although this is kind of an old story It's really frustrating to see the gleeful disdain of copyleft lately. It's also frustrating to see that there are not many paths to sponsored income for developing copyleft software (see author of the mold linker's blog)
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
Isn't part of the "freedom" of software development to be able to license your software however you want?
Tannenbaum chose the Berkeley license for MINIX and he doesn't seem to regret it. There already exist plenty of copyleft licensed kernels, imo it is healthy to have plenty of projects with varying levels of permissiveness.
Top-Rub-4670@reddit
I agree. There are many benefits to copyleft and I would love if it became dominant again.
However, you know what else is frustrating? Seing how copyleft people get outraged on behalf of people who willingly and deliberately choose a non-copyleft license for their project.
I present to you: this thread! See also any thread about rust's coreutils.
parkbot@reddit
Fun fact about Tanenbaum is that he started a popular electoral vote tracking/political news site over 20 years ago. He used to go by “Votemaster”.
https://electoral-vote.com/evp2026/Info/welcome.html
Apprehensive_Milk520@reddit
Then as now - never sign anything without reading, and/or understanding, it. And also don't complain unless you understand the circumstances - but we all tend to get judgey.
I don't feel it's fair, a lot of what has been done with open source in the name of greed, but it's not my say - it's the author's and the license under which it was published (or not).
Open source can be used with good intent or for less than virtuous pursuits. We can only hope more good comes from open source than just helping to line the pockets of greedy companies.
Sometimes, we can only take an idea just so far, develop it just so much, but there's always someone else who can move it forward from there and use it, fork it, make it into something truly useful... they deserve as much credit as those upon whose work their own was built. Just my opinion, though...
Adorable-One362@reddit
That’s why it’s called Open Source. 🤷🏻♂️ Linus doesn’t make any money on the kernel.
emfloured@reddit
"corporations will take everything they can and give back as little as possible"
Google was once wanted to the god of pure innocence, they believed on "Don't be evil". They offered the Oracle to pay/fund for using just abstract classes or something like that, these weren't even the implementation files. Oracle being bunch of cunts when presented with the offer by Google thought they could sue Google instead in a hope to extract more money off of them. Fast forward (2019?), Google did win the case but they now realized they have to be one the cunts too otherwise they might not survive the next attempt. They deleted their "Don't be evil" motto off their campuses.
It's a winner and loser world. You either kill and eat others first, or be killed and eaten by others.
In my opinion, Andrew Tanenbaum was a hypocrite who complained about not having been given credit/"thank you!"/compensation by Intel. He chose that direction the day he released his OS without the GPL.
MatchingTurret@reddit
In which universe did that happen?
ABotelho23@reddit
That's what happens when you use permissive licenses. Defend your code people.
No-Dentist-1645@reddit
Copying a comment I did I reply to someone as a top level comment since I think it provides some important missing context to anyone reading this post:
The author is perfectly happy with how things turned out tho. The initial post is slightly misleading since it implies the author was pissed that he didn't receive any monetary support, but in reality he wrote an open letter thanking Intel, with the only "complaint" being:
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
So yeah, a lot of people releasing software with open licenses are aware of what it means and don't expect it to be something other than what it is
kopsis@reddit
If Tannenbaum doesn't mind, why should I? He chose the license specifically so corporations could do exactly what Intel did. Some people get satisfaction from creating things others find useful and don't feel the need to compel others to embrace a narrow definition of "free".
granadesnhorseshoes@reddit
yeah, welcome to the real world. The people building everything are almost never the ones reaping the profits. They love to give us one or two exceptions to the rule but the vast majority never get the profits of their work. From glow sticks, wd40, scotch tape, safety glass, teflon, video game cartridges... All created by just average salary employees that never got super rich of their work, but the corporations did.
Modern exceptions that required decades of legal action include windshield wipers, and super soakers.
"Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind." -- Morpheus
Gabochuky@reddit
He should've used a different license then.
deja_geek@reddit
Andrew doesn’t really care.
algaefied_creek@reddit
MINIX 3.4.0 was using netBSD Userland atop the minix kernel.
There are a few compsci guys I know interested in working on it via Discord and slack to try to bring it up to NetBSD 11.0 once that releases.
You interested?
RexOfRecursion@reddit
i have no idea about any of that but sounds cool as shit.
Content_Chemistry_44@reddit
That's just Intel's backd00r.
coolcosmos@reddit
That's life
Zealousideal-Gap-963@reddit
Andrew attualmente é anche colui che ha scritto il libro “I moderni Sistemi operativi” su cui ho dovuto studiare per dare la materia Sistemi Operativi in università. Che tu sia lodato, Maestro, ho amato il tuo libro, ho amato le tue battute, ho amato il mondo dei sistemi operativi.
Schlonzig@reddit
Glory to the GPL!