Apple Inc (AAPL)

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Friday, October 6th

Intel accused of "open-source fraud"

Key OpenBSD developers have accused Intel of being an "open-source fraud" due to firmware "blobs" in open-source projects which are not distributed freely and without restriction. "By withholding, Intel is being an open-source fraud," said leading OpenBSD project creator Theo de Raadt, who went on to suggest that Intel should follow the example of other companies in the market, according to Slashdot and KernelTrap. "Intel must do this firmware grant in the same way that Adaptec, Atmel, Broadcom, Cirrus Logic, Cyclades, QLogic, Ralink, and LSI and lots of other companies have granted distribution firmware to be used by others."

Apple receives its CPUs exclusively from Intel, but the Cupertino-based company also maintains its proprietary AppleACPIPlatform driver -- which is necessary to boot the current Darwin OS -- and was said to be stonewalling open-source developers by the administrator of the GNU-Darwin Distribution back in early August.