The secret use of Minix3 inside Intel ME can be copyright infringement

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 is 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 require 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!

Here is a longer explanation that I wrote:
http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2017...

Stretching things?

[Chromium_One]

I can see the argument, though my reading of the BSD license would suggest so long as the text is present in the IME binaries that's enough. No actual need to display them to the user. Consider the Win95 TCP/IP stack as an example. So far as I recall, the minimum notices were present in the binaries, and nothing else was ever done. Taking it further, If the binaries are obfuscated in some way in the main BIOS image prior to being loaded to IME at boot (say, compressed) then the license is probably still s

Re:

[anjara]

Nah, when the license specify that the recipient must receive the copyright notice, the conditions and the disclaimer in the documentation and/or other material, then it is for the purpose of the recipient to read and be able to understand. If you printed the license in a completely unreadable font in the manual, then you would not comply. If you store the license completely unreadable Huffman coded inside a flash, then you would not comply.