Post Syndicated from Bradley M. Kuhn original http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2015/09/22/vw.html

The issue of software freedom is, not surprisingly, not mentioned in
the mainstream
coverage of Volkswagen’s recent use of proprietary software to circumvent
important regulations that exist for the public good. Given
that Volkswagen
is an upstream contributor to Linux, it’s highly likely that Volkswagen
vehicles have Linux in them.

Thus, we have a wonderful example of how much we sacrifice at the altar of
“Linux adoption”. While I’m glad for some Free
Software to appear in products rather than none, I also believe
that, too often, our community happily accepts the idea that we should
gratefully laud any company that includes even a tiny bit of Free Software in their product,
and gives a little code back, even if most of what they do is proprietary
software.

In this example, a company poisoned people and our environment with
out-of-compliance greenhouse gas emissions, and hid their tracks behind
proprietary software. IIUC, the EPA had to use an (almost literal)
analog hole to catch these scoundrels.

It’s not that I’m going to argue that end users should modify the software
that verifies emissions standards. But if end users could
extract these binaries from the physical device, recompile the source, and
verify the binaries match, someone would have discovered this problem
immediately when the models drove off the lot.

So, why does no one demand for this? To me, this feels like Diebold and
voting machines all over again. So tell me, voters’ rights advocates who
claimed proprietary software was fine, as long as you could get
voter-verified paper records: how do are we going to “paper
verify” our emissions testing?

Software freedom is the only solution to problems that proprietary
software creates. Sadly, opposition to software freedom is so strong,
nearly everyone will desperately try every other (failing) solution
first.