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Electrek reports that Tesla is beginning compliance efforts with respect to their GPL redistribution of components such as Linux, Busybox, Buildroot, QT, and other components:
Tesla has been taking some flak for years now in the software community for using open source software without complying with the licenses. In a step toward compliance, Tesla is now releasing some parts of its software, which is going to be useful to Tesla hackers and security researchers.
Some of the copyright holders have been complaining that Tesla hasn't been complying with their licenses. Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization pushing for open source software, has been on Tesla's case for a while over the issue.
We had received multiple reports of a GPL violation regarding Tesla's Model S. Customers who purchased Tesla's Model S received on-board system(s) that contained BusyBox and Linux, but did not receive any source code, nor an offer for the source... We know that Tesla received useful GPL compliance advice from multiple organizations, in addition to us, over these years."
In beginning their compliance efforts, Tesla Motors has specifically established Github repositories for their distributed builds of Buildroot and Linux for version 2018.12 of their software stack. Tesla's e-mail announcement read in part:
"Currently the material that is there is representative of the 2018.12 release, but it will be updated with new versions corresponding to new releases over time. Work is underway on preparing sources in other areas as well, together with a more coordinated information page. We wanted to let you know about this material as it is available now while work continues on the other parts. For further questions, please contact opensource@tesla.com."
With the brilliance of Mr. Musk and his ample staff, one would think that they would have figured out their license obligations without literally years of outside help--many small all-volunteer projects do it seemingly effortlessly as a matter of course--but in that, one would be wrong.
Also submitted by canopic jug.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @03:33PM (4 children)
The company has no problem spending money - MSDN licenses at thousands of dollars per developer per year are not a problem, and a similar licensing arrangement with Qt at a similar price would have been readily accepted.
What Qt(commercial) was proposing was taking a percentage of our device sales as a form of royalty - this would involve disclosure of sales volumes, pricing and other sensitive information that costs a tremendous amount of administrative and internal political overhead to get released.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Monday May 21 2018, @04:19PM (3 children)
Isn't gathering and submitting this data already required for purposes of taxation anyway? I see a lot of reasons of keeping such information hidden from public at large but none of them would be convincing for someone who wants to act as a honest and fair player on the free market. Even then such data could be shared with Qt people under an NDA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @04:40PM (2 children)
Yes, but (in a multinational corporation) that data is gathered and submitted by a complex organizational structure and is not released to the public in the same detail or format as would be required for software royalty payments.
All sounds good in theory, and in practice we're very much an above board large multinational corporation - but that doesn't mean that every manager/director/VP involved in making such a flow of information possible is ready and willing to do so. The bottom line is: a higher flat fee - not tied to sales numbers, would be preferred by many aspects of the corporation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by loonycyborg on Monday May 21 2018, @06:33PM (1 child)
Even then I expect accountability for things like MP3 patent royalties would make this easily implementable. All in all this boils down to people not being willing to do their work. In that case they're not entitled to their salaries either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 21 2018, @06:49PM
Perhaps... however, have you ever tried to deal with a government bureaucracy? Those people are required by law to perform their functions for you, which is not at all the case in a corporation.
Nobody is entitled to anything, least of all pushy fear mongering sales people trying to upsell LGPL software into a company that doesn't need the additional benefits they are hawking.
🌻🌻 [google.com]