BMW Australia refuses to comply with GPL license terms.

Australian car owner Duncan Bayne reported a violation of the GNU GPL (GNU General Public License). The violator is none other than the well-known German car manufacturer BMW.

The BMW model range has a BMW i3 electric car. The machine is all good, but is known for its defective software . For example, despite the presence of a workable 3G modem, the installation of all major updates can only be performed by an authorized dealer: it must leave the car for a day or two. Only updates for the car infotainment system are installed manually.

The update website does not use SSL. The site for some reason asks for a VIN and requires you to accept the user agreement before giving access to the files, although they are freely available through direct links . Anyone can modify a file that is transmitted over an unprotected connection.

Security experts recently conducted a reverse-engineering of the BMW i3 firmware.
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They found a copious amount of systemd and freedesktop mentions.



Since the system works under Linux, the developer must comply with the terms of the GPL license, that is, provide the source code along with the binary files.

With such a request, Duncan Bein turned to the Australian division of BMW, but was refused .

A consultant from the Customer Relationship Center said that he had consulted with the technical department specialists and said the following: “To access the software download site, you had to provide a seven-digit VIN and accept the terms of the user agreement. Part of the terms of the user agreement states that the software is protected by copyright and BMW is its sole owner. So in this case, it is not subject to the requirements of a “public” license. ”

Duncan Bane called BMW Australia on the phone, but did not achieve anything. Now the community and lawyers of the Free Software Foundation have to decide what to do in this situation.

BMW has a special website where they publish a code for changes they have made to various Open Source projects, including ConnMan . But there is no firmware code and updates that are directly installed in cars.