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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

I've got a draft to our CEO sitting in my inbox outlining why we should open source some of our code - the majority of the argument posits that "technical investment" (as a corollary to technical debt) is possible. OSS can be viewed as a "technical share market," and by moving non-competitive code to open source you stand to reap "technical profit" or dividends. Not to mention that open-sourcing code usually entails a major cleanup effort (technical debt removal) prior to release.

I've already got CoreCLR listed as a positive example of this process and I really hope that BMW is rewarded for compliance (with feedback and patches) - having more examples will only strengthen my point that more can be gained by working with open source, instead of merely consuming permissive open source.

Either way, it's great to see compliance from such a large corporate.

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> I've already got CoreCLR listed as a positive example of this process and I really hope that BMW is rewarded for compliance (with feedback and patches) - having more examples will only strengthen my point that more can be gained by working with open source, instead of merely consuming permissive open source.

I guarantee you no benefit will come to BMW for this. The reason is that this is a mostly useless code dump for the purpose of fulfilling the license. It's just a bunch of old code from open source projects you can download off the web. If they made changes to any of those, they're probably minimal, and my experience with such code drops is that they're also unlikely to actually build.

If you release a product as free software, develop it in the open and encourage contributions, it can be a benefit for you.

If you use a GPL'd library in your big proprietary solution, some pesky random internet commenter demands the GPL'd sources and you send him a tarball of an old version of newlib and a linux 2.4 kernel tree with some seriously out of date ARM patches, you won't get anything back, and you probably don't expect to.

Send it. If I can control and extend the computing environment in my car, I will buy that car. I will also release the code I write for it - which creates apps other car makers don't have.

If you end up tweaking the breaking system, just don't do it too late at night and remember putting an "I hacked my car's software" sticker somewhere visible from other cars in the road.

For any of this you'd likely need all the code and, if I'm understanding things correctly, this is only a partial dump (things licensed under GPL).

That is an interesting point in terms of roadworthy legislation, though.

The "braking" system - or was that typo intended?

Either way, you don't need a license or even much in the way of special tools to replace the brake pads, rotors, calipers, or hoses on any vehicles on the road today. The parts are casually sold at tens of thousands of auto stores across the country in enormous volumes every day, many of them to ordinary men and women working on their cars in their garages. Not all of them get it right, but there is no outcry against this maintenance - why should there be a problem with software?

To further assuage your fears, braking systems and other safety-critical components have layers of software and physical fail-safes. If the wheel sensors report unusual data, all-wheel-drive may be disabled. If the anti-lock code doesn't work, you still have regular brakes. If the vacuum assist doesn't work, you still have manual brakes. Similar layers are present in the steering and engine control. If a mechanic applies caliper grease to the brake pads, all of this is for naught - but there is little the software can do to completely disable the brakes.

> Either way, you don't need a license or even much in the way of special tools to replace the brake pads, rotors, calipers, or hoses on any vehicles on the road today.

Some cars sold today require connecting of specialised diagnostics tool which will allow to change brake pads. Without this tool your calipers will not open. What this tool does? It just sends some commands through vehicle CAN bus, but those commands are proprietary, so you need to pay them about $10k-$100k a year to have access to commands for their cars and licence to use them in your tool.

is there any email account to sent a resume for that team ? :)

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