I presume the older software is tied to a relationship with B-Squared that has deteriorated beyond what current economics will allow and B-Squared doesn't know QNX or Linux. B-Squared's claim to fame is they talk about how much they know WindowsCE very well. It's their tool of choice even though Adobe ActionScript is largely to blame.

Keep in mind to add SYNC to your vehicle, it's $300 (or it was when it first came out). Cheap right? Ford is in the business to sell cars and what sells more cars, they want.

I'm not a lawyer, I see your point and was somewhat vocal on my own, but in my tenure I learned that Ford is a very successful company and they pay smart people to keep them out of trouble. I have to give Ford props for not taking any bail out money but I digress...

One more tid-bit I will add is that Ford never deals directly with the public. You get your vehicle serviced through dealerships.

So when Ford SYNC came out, they were trying to find away for customers to buy additional services via the SYNC system. This of course meant Ford had to now deal with the whole concept of accepting credit cards or finding a partner who knew how to accept credit cards.

As an architect on the team, one of my tasks was to assess the whole PCI compliance, what it would do to us if we got hacked, etc... In the early days, Ford tried to partner with PayPal to handle the credit card stuff but because Ford has a products it would collect for that are also provided by 3rd parties, it just made things very challenging. I'll spare the details but one of the issues I worked on was single sign on technology. You have a mix of technologies like WS-Federation, SAML, etc... and trying to get Ford and all the partners to adopt and stand up this stuff takes a L O N G time. Consider also some of these smaller companies don't have same budget as a Fortune-5 or even know what SAML is so you have a lot of educating going on too.