I think the Hacker News crowd is just a little baffled because there are some conflicting emotions on display from Dr. T here. Conflicting emotions are a very human thing to have, and are guaranteed to confuse the engineer crowd.
1. He's glad Minix is useful to others
2. He's slightly hurt that Intel repeatedly asked him for help (which he provided) but never bothered to thank him or even let him know the purpose of their inquiries. ("That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.")
3. He admits that his choice of license permits this behavior, so he (slightly grudgingly) accepts their choice ("If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users")
#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.
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#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:
"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."
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.
I think he would of appreciated some type of compensation from Intel given its massive usage by a massive company. Not even a small thank you donation. It is sort of shitty on Intel's part to not compensate him at all and also they got a large number of questions/support from him.
They should throw a donation of $1M his way. Even at that rate, it is a massive steal.
Yes, that's how I interpreted the joke about the license's failure to mention the appreciation of payment. Chump change to Intel is a big deal to an individual.
I think the Hacker News crowd is just a little baffled because there are some conflicting emotions on display from Dr. T here. Conflicting emotions are a very human thing to have, and are guaranteed to confuse the engineer crowd.
1. He's glad Minix is useful to others
2. He's slightly hurt that Intel repeatedly asked him for help (which he provided) but never bothered to thank him or even let him know the purpose of their inquiries. ("That certainly wasn't required in any way, but I think it would have been polite to give me a heads up, that's all.")
3. He admits that his choice of license permits this behavior, so he (slightly grudgingly) accepts their choice ("If nothing else, this bit of news reaffirms my view that the Berkeley license provides the maximum amount of freedom to potential users")