cool fact: the intel management engine is (was?) based on a permissively licensed kernel called minix made by andrew tanenbaum
they did not even notify him after they profited off his work for free
using a cuck license can be incredibly stupid. remember: when you license under mit, you're doing it for big tech for free
I wanna push back a little bit on this. Yeah, Andrew Tanenbaum got the raw end of the deal when Intel utilised MINIX 3 for the Management Engine. That said, dismissing all permissive licenses as "cuck licenses" risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There
are practical problems with the GPL, beyond the ideological baggage and opacity that GPLv3 came with. While I'd love to quote the entire OpenBSD licensing policy verbatim, it's a lengthy read. I did the normie thing by consulting ChatGPT for a summary; please read the original page if you take umbrage with an AI summary.
ChatGPT summary of OpenBSD copyright policy said:
The OpenBSD copyright policy explains that copyright law automatically grants creators ownership of their original works upon creation — no registration is needed. Copyright protects the expression of ideas, not the underlying material a new work might be based on. It distinguishes between original works, derivative works (those based on or modifying existing material), and compilations (collections of multiple works). Importantly, the copyright of a derivative or compilation covers only the new material added, not the preexisting works within it. Under international law (specifically the Berne Convention), authors also retain certain moral rights — such as the right to be credited and to object to harmful alterations — which cannot be legally surrendered, even if economic rights (like copying or distribution) are licensed or transferred.
In contrast, contract or license law governs how permissions to use copyrighted material are granted. A license extends certain rights (like copying or modification) that copyright law alone wouldn’t allow, while a copyright transfer gives someone else ownership of the work. Licenses like the ISC or BSD essentially make software as free as possible without violating moral rights; changing them usually either reduces freedom, changes nothing legally, or becomes invalid by overreaching. A key distinction is that licenses and releases apply only to the parts of a work that the copyright holder actually owns—they cannot extend or restrict rights to material owned by others.
Where copyright and contract law conflict, copyright law takes precedence. For example, altering or removing copyright notices doesn’t remove the underlying rights — it only creates legal uncertainty about who may use the material. Similarly, adding new terms that contradict the original license doesn’t override it and may void the modifier’s own right to distribute. Once permissions are granted under a license, they’re irrevocable for copies already distributed: the author cannot retroactively withdraw rights from users who legitimately received them. Thus, the policy emphasizes that copyright defines ownership and scope of rights, while licenses and contracts define the terms of sharing — and neither can legally contradict the other’s boundaries.
Some selections from the OpenBSD team's thoughts on other licenses.
OpenBSD Copyright Policy said:
Apache
The original Apache license was similar to the Berkeley license, but source code published under version 2 of the Apache license is subject to additional restrictions and cannot be included into OpenBSD. In particular, if you use code under the Apache 2 license, some of your rights will terminate if you claim in court that the code violates a patent.
A license can only be considered fully permissive if it allows use by anyone for all the future without giving up any of their rights. If there are conditions that might terminate any rights in the future, or if you have to give up a right that you would otherwise have, even if exercising that right could reasonably be regarded as morally objectionable, the code is not free.
In addition, the clause about the patent license is problematic because a patent license cannot be granted under Copyright law, but only under contract law, which drags the whole license into the domain of contract law. But while Copyright law is somewhat standardized by international agreements, contract law differs wildly among jurisdictions. So what the license means in different jurisdictions may vary and is hard to predict.
GNU General Public License, GPL, LGPL, copyleft, etc.
The GNU Public License and licenses modeled on it impose the restriction that source code must be distributed or made available for all works that are derivatives of the GNU copyrighted code.
While this may superficially look like a noble strategy, it is a condition that is typically unacceptable for commercial use of software. So in practice, it usually ends up hindering free sharing and reuse of code and ideas rather than encouraging it. As a consequence, no additional software bound by the GPL terms will be considered for inclusion into the OpenBSD base system.
For historical reasons, the OpenBSD base system still includes the following GPL-licensed components: the GNU compiler collection (GCC) with supporting binutils and libraries, GNU CVS, GNU texinfo, the mkhybrid file system creation tool, and the readline library. Replacement by equivalent, more freely licensed tools is a long-term desideratum.
TLDR: The GPL is built upon contract law, whilst using copyright law as its primary enforcement mechanism. This creates tangible problems for commercial entities that
want to utilise free software, but
cannot abide by the restrictions that the GPL itself places. If ideology isn't necessarily an issue, then corporate legal teams, who are unfamiliar with free software, are simply seeking to avoid liability risks. The same also applies to version 2 of the Apache License, specifically with the patent termination provisions.
Furthermore, MINIX was the passion project of a Dutch American computer scientist. MINIX was designed as a teaching operating system for compsci majors, with the tangential goal of proving the superiority of microkernels over monolithic kernels. The entire code base of MINIX is also stupidly small, like under 15,000 lines of code. This makes MINIX suitable not only for teaching students how operating systems function under the hood, but also for developing extremely tiny embedded applications, such as Intel's Management Engine. The MIT License absolutely dicked Tanenbaum over, and we can't ever forget that. Yet to dismiss
all permissive licenses as "cuck licenses" means that colossal behemoths like the FreeBSD Project, also licensed permissively, is also a cuck project. Yet we have so much evidence to the contrary that FreeBSD is a cucked project.
FreeBSD, and its various components, are the foundation for stuff like Netflix's streaming platform, Sony's PlayStation 4 OS (maybe PS5 too?), not to mention being the backend for WhatsApp's servers. FreeBSD, as a permissively licensed operating system project,
also receives a great deal of contributions
back from these companies. If not monetarily, then through code contributions. FreeBSD's commitment to permissive licensing emerged from being a literal descendant of AT&T Unix through 386BSD. They literally took two clauses out of the original Berkley license, giving us the FreeBSD license. Is the FreeBSD license inherently superior to the MIT license? Probably not, since they're almost identical in terms of practical impact. I think the big differentiator here is that Andy Tanenbaum was just one guy working on a passion project that went nowhere until Intel decided to jack MINIX for their own ends, whilst FreeBSD is a colossal project dating back to the late 1980s/early 1990s.
As to my own thoughts, I'm more partial to permissive licensing, but I'm a loser who never wrote anything monumental that deserves to stay open to the public like GNU Readline. Maybe if I wrote something like that, I'd probably have a reason to stand by the GPL.
