Mercedes shipping mini CDs with its vehicles to fulfill GPL requirements
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Because that was RMS' original motivation, that he couldn't fix the bug in his printer.
The GPL doesn't have a (meaningful) mandate that the user be able to replace the software that is under the GPL. Only that the source be made available.
This was fine in the 70s/80s when mainframes were the ruling class. Roughly a femtosecond after the market for embedded machines came along where the person setting up the system wasn't expected to have to compile the runtime environment, that died. Somewhere around THERAC-1 and the Altair.
That's why quite a few new products are still using old GPL v2 licensed software.
That "narrow" case is the entire case.
I'm currently working on a product for a well-known company and there's a corporate ban on GPLv3. And we do get audited.
For now anyway. I would be surprised if cars do not end up with apps. The car will come with the base software installed and then you can later buy apps for your car from an app store run by the car maker.
Like how macOS ships with bash 2.7 or whatever
But if you share your changed code's binaries, you are bound to share the source for them.
No comment on street legality.
"Why is your email in my car?"
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2018/02/16/why-is-your-email-in-...
I'd say its a start but needs the car's full source and build environment. I wanna do a 'make world' or whatever and replace the cars' firmware at home.
I've started to grok the industrial/government complex, and it really annoys the crap out of me. It's an attempt to do an end run around the consumer by doing de facto centralized control through companies, instead of actually implementing things in such a way as the entire lifecycle from production to EoL is able to be sampled and assessed.
Like, take diesel emissions.
We have a farce of a test suite that's done on a design by design basis. Then that is locked in and sssumed for that model of vehicle. This is exactly why people converged on defeat devices instead of actually going for compliance.
Imagine if you will, a world where you can reconfigure your firmware, load it, test it on your property, fire off a copy to a regulator to get plugged into a test bed and put through the paces, and get a result back with an adjusted fee to reflect the difference in performance against standards for those changes.
You have the option to tool differently. You can tinker, you can even find configurations better than the original implementer. You also get a record of change for insurance/warranty auditing purposes. (Though again, I'm squeamish on making life easier for manufacturers in that regard as long as they continue to use services like https://cccis.com/)
There are levels of corporate surveillance I'm not willing to accommodate.
You can if you would pay $10m to cover all the testing costs just to make a one line change to the firmware so braking works slightly more smoothly for you.
The reason that things are centralized like this way is because it's more efficient to make a single car model safe for a million people rather than test a million different versions of cars programmed by different people. In a world without all that corporate surveillance, where everyone works on his own, a bicycle is as much as you can expect to get.
Under GPL, you are only entitled to the source of the binaries you are given.
Suppose Alice the Accountant buys a car and it comes with a CD containing the full source for all the GPL software used in the car. Alice is not a programmer and loses the CD or throws it away.
Then Alice sells the car to Peter the Programmer. Peter sees that the car is using GPL software and wants the source. Is there anyone who has to provide the source to him?
The car company does not because they fully satisfied their GPL obligations with respect to the particular binaries in that car when they included the source CD.
I expect that Alice would also be off the hook. It is true that in passing the car to Peter she has distributed copyrighted GPL code (the binaries in the car), but she just passed on a copy that was lawfully made and received by her. That should be covered under the first sale doctrine [1].
We thus seem to end up with a GPL binary in the wild with no one obligated to provide the source for that binary.
I wonder if anyone has seriously considered a license that prohibits binary distributions? Processors are fast enough now and storage is cheap enough that in a lot of embedded applications it would probably be feasible to have the software stored in source form and compile it each time the system started.
[1] What the first sale doctrine says is that it is not a violation of the copyright owner's exclusive distribution right for someone who has received a lawfully made copy to pass that particular copy on to someone else.
The significance of the first sale doctrine here is that if it applies then Alice's distribution of the binary to Bob does not require permission from the copyright holder.
As an otherwise reasonably satisfied Onyx BOOX owner, I'd very much like to see the company fulfilling its GPL and other licensing obligations.
Maybe in the U.S. we can build one out of corn?
C'mon, who's with me, "Hackers News"? Let's hack!