No, the user that matters for GPL is the car owner. The point in the linked comment is that given how the market works, there is little incentive to work towards changing regulation (or even just interpretation of or belief about the regulation, I have clue if there are actually countries where this is impossible, but know for sure it's a widespread belief in the industry), because the company applying for certification is not the one getting annoyed by having to avoid GPLv3.
Re:Debian Running on Rust Coreutils
by andrewshadura on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @05:15AM
(#26397283)
I obviously meant end users in this case.
The chain of software delivery often looks like this:
Small subcontractor delivers parts of system→ big company provides ready to use solution → hardware vendor uses the solution and gets their devices certified → end user uses the final product
In this case, the hardware vendor is mostly interested in having their devices work as intended. Everyone up the delivery chain has to meet their requirements in some way to basically get paid. That's not a position where it's easy to make demands regarding certifications, since the hardware vendor may just go to someone else.
if your car kills your kid, eg the airbag misfired, or the lane assist went into oncoming traffic, then the car vendor will look for any opportunity to evade and refute responsibility. including claims of self tampering with the car. now in the burnt wreck, forensics need to show beyond doubt that it was, indeed, the car vendors shipment that killed the kid. how do you show as DA, that indeed the software was untampered with?
drm.
ps: airbags not working is less of a software problem than airbags misfiring.
Edit since the parent was in fact speaking about the end-user, which I misunderstood: I don't see the problem either. The manufacturer has no obligation to prevent the end user from updating his car's software. There is no locks that prevents the car owner to just disable his airbag[2], or remove the safety belt. It's illegal to do so in most countries, and if the user do do and injure himself or somebody else because of that modification, they are on their own. I don't think it should be any different for software actually.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26397176 [2] Edit: in fact, this is a bad example, because you need to be able to disable the airbag to put an infant car seat next to the driver.