[bitdiddle]

#2. Exactly, seems to me an academic kind of thing, he helped them a lot, a little attribution would not have hurt, and the lawyers could have easily been told to pipe down.

#3. It does offer the maximum freedom to some potential users, but no responsibilities to extend those freedoms to others. In my opinion this is why the GPL truly extends the maximum amount of freedom to everyone, users, lusers, abusers, and just plain old hackers.

[wolfgke]

> #2. Exactly, seems to me an academic kind of thing, he helped them a lot, a little attribution would not have hurt, and the lawyers could have easily been told to pipe down.

The BSD license used by MINIX 3 requires attribution:

> http://wiki.minix3.org/doku.php?id=faq&s[]=license#what_is_t...

"The MINIX 3 license is a clone of the Berkeley (BSD) license. In plain English, it says you can do whatever you like with the system provided that (1) you agree not to sue us under any conditions, and (2) you keep the credit lines in the source, documentation, and publicity unless other arrangements have been made. Specifically, you are free to modify the source code, redistribute it, incorporate it into commercial products with only the above restrictions."

[bm1362]

I believe Intel did give attribution, but to MINIX itself. It really is just an ask for a 'hey, thanks' that was deserved.

[wolfgke]

Hackers have problems understanding this kind of "vanity issues" (I also openly admit that I have difficulties).

I am not aware that Intel gave any credit that is visible to the end-users of their processors (otherwise I would surely have seen it, since my laptop has a Skylake processor - so it uses MINIX 3). I am also not aware that my laptop included a leaflet that mentioned MINIX 3 somewhere.

So my assumption rather is that Intel's lawyers reached an agreement with the license holders of MINIX 3 that they don't have to give credit (which is perfectly fine - even the quote in my parent post mentions this possibility). But if they did such an agreement they said that it is perfectly fine to them (in particular for Andrew S. Tanenbaum) that Intel does not credit them publicly. I thus consider it as rather unfair to complain when such an agreement exists, because one typically does not demand such an agreement if one plans to credit them nevertheless.

So I rather believe what happened is this: Intel came to the MINIX 3 developers to get them to sign such an agreement, which allows Intel not to give attribution. Andrew S. Tanenbaum signed it, because it sounded too good to be true and gave MINIX 3 some very renowned key customer. But he did not consider that this might put MINIX 3 into very common use without any users being aware of it. So he "suddenly" realized the loophole of this agreement and now considers himself treated unfairly.