[timonovici]

The source code won't give you shit. Even if you have it all, right here, right now:

1. you cannot disable it completely - there's an image of Intel ME, burned into the chipset, which checks for the presence of the ME + AMT in the SPI flash, and it checks for signature. (There's an exception to this, with skylake and above)

2. you cannot run a modified or reverse engineered version of it, unless you have Intel's private key to sign your own binary.

Basically the hardware is tivoized.

[jordigh]

Well, source code under GPLv3 would prevent this too. The source code is one building block, but it's not the only one. It does seem like a necessary building block to begin with, though. Otherwise, how could you make the hardware do what you want it to do if you don't even have access to modify what it's currently doing?