But then again, as a Dutch person I have enough issues locally that I can't even complain...
Ugly times.
He absolutely raves about them. It sounds like he's got some good coders.
No, pretty much just the manufacturer loses. Short term the operator loses, but I'm sure that the courts will award damages.
For me, this incident is a welcome argument with which I can tighten the screws on manufacturers in the next round of train buying (at minimum, they will agree to heavy contractual fines for anything like this; at best I get full source code for every train).
For too long the only priority in OT was safety (fine in the 80ies, but the second you integrate an IP stack that posture doesn't work anymore). This has been changing in the industry thanks to EU-regulation; this incident will accelerate the change.
> (...)I can tighten the screws on manufacturers in the next round of train buying(...)
But then I can see it might help change things for the better across the board, as you nicely described. Thanks for the illuminating comment!
https://www.google.com/search?q=version+control+plc+programm...
You'd have to be pretty daft to do this kind of development today and not take advantage of version control and even the most visual versions of these systems eventually output files. You may not be able to do a line-by-line comparison but you will have a commit log with helpful messages.
Look for 'engage in anti-competitive behavior' in the log message ;)