Intel's ME May Be Massively Infringing on Minix3's Free Software License (ipwatchdog.com)

Software engineer (and IP Watchdog contributor) Fredrik Ohrstrom (a.k.a. Slashdot reader anjara) writes: Almost all Free Software licenses (BSD, MIT, GPL...) require some sort of legal notice (legal attribution) given to the recipient of the software, both when the software is distributed in source and in binary forms. The legal notice usually contains the copyright holder's name and the license text. This means that it's not possible to hide and keep secret the existence of Free Software that you have stuck into your product that you distribute. If you do so, then you are not complying with the Free Software license and you are committing a copyright infringement!

This is exactly what Intel seems to have done with the Intel ME. The Minix3 operating system license requires a legal notice, but so far it seems like Intel has not given the necessary legal notices. (Probably because they want to keep the inside of the ME secret.) Thus not only is Minix3 the most installed OS on our recent x86 CPUs -- but it might also the most pirated OS on our recent x86 CPUs!

Comments

Re:Do you think they care?

[thsths]

No, corporate employees are not usually evil. The secret of a commercial organisation is to diffuse responsibility, so that you can perform evil actions with non-evil employees. Everybody things they are doing the right thing, just following procedures etc, but the end result is often evil.

Re:Do you think they care?

[OrangeTide]

If the copyright infringement is willful, the maximum penalty increases to $150,000 per violation.

Why not use MPAA and RIAA tactics against Intel? They can pay $150k per CPU they shipped in the last several years. If the Minix copyright holders are feeling nice, they can accept a lesser settlement instead.

That's how the law works.