I wish people stopped trying to tip-toe around the poor, hurt feelings of BMW. BMW is a big company and can afford to have properly trained customer reps that know how to point to the source code. We're the little guy here trying to figure out how our cars work; BMW is the giant just meeting their bare minimum requirements.
BMW doesn't actually have any feelings - it's a corporation, and it doesn't care how much some hacker is upset when a twitter rep doesn't know what open source is.
The only people who care about software licences are people who write software. Deal with it.
> The only people who care about software licences are people who write software.
This is not true in any way - people who use and sell software, such as BMW, spend a lot of time, money, and lawyers on licensing issues.
Corporations care about anything that affects their bottom line, and a distinguished hacker who raises a small ruckus could ultimately build into disaster. It's simply responsible to have your front line know who to refer people to when they ask if you're in compliance with the law.
Frankly I really disagree, to ask BMW to train all it's service reps to provide source code when only a _very_ small portion of the population will be asking for it is a bit ridiculous. Now, I can maybe see some sort of training where they basically tell them to redirect someone to a special rep.
