The good news follow-up rarely gets as much attention as the original bad-news story.

Earlier this month I accidentally kicked off a minor kerfuffle over whether BMW was respecting the GPL. Their i3 car contains a huge amount of Open Source Software and there was some confusion as to BMW’s compliance with the licence terms.

I took a look through the car’s user interface and, hidden away, was this email address.



I dropped them an email. And then a reminder.

Well, today I received this letter in the post:

With this ancient piece of spinning media 🙂



That’s 950MB of open source goodness!

Mirror

To save you having to get a DVD shipped to your location, I’ve mirrored the files on GitHub. A file tree is also provided at the end of this blog post.

Lots of interesting – and outdated – software packages in there.

Lessons

In my original blog post, I speculated on BMW’s GPL compliance, that was irresponsible of me.

Large companies move slowly. It’s tempting to go off on a Twitter crusade if you haven’t heard back after five minutes. Patience, grasshopper.

Customer service agents are geared up to deal with normal queries. It’s unfair to take them to task for not understanding software licences.

BMW would do well to set up a simple website or FTP site containing all of this data. Or, at the very least, making it more obvious how to obtain it.

Open Source Software is wonderful!

File Listing

You can download from GitHub – but here’s a quick list of everything on the DVD. Enjoy!