On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 6:14 PM, Felix Domke <[email protected]> wrote: > [GPL request for built-in car hardware] > ... > What would be the right path to request a copy of the source code? Would it > be the car manufacturer (Volkswagen), the car dealer, or Novero itself?
Personally, I'd walk up the chain of ownership* and ask for source from each of them. So that would look like this: * You * Previous owner (was he the first owner?) * Dealership * Manufacturer of the car (who presumably added the gateway to the car) * Manufacturer (of the gateway) As I understand the GPL, each entity in that chain was responsible for passing-along the offer for source when transferring ownership of the gateway/car. What I find interesting is that the offer for source needs only be valid for 3 years, yet cars are often sold and resold for many years after that: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html This creates a situation in which the original owner of the car may enjoy the 4 Freedoms of Free Software, but subsequent owners and operators of the car may not. So even if you have a piece of hardware in your car containing GPLed software, you might have no standing to request the source. Blarg. --R * I'm sure there's some neat Latin term for this -- lawyers: clue me in? :-)
