I think you simply hit someone from [oversea] sales / customer relations who has no idea about licenses or probably software at all and thinks he does the right thing. I'm pretty sure there is someone at BMW who knows about it (the industry is aware of licensing issues in general) and that there should also be a process installed through which they can fulfill the license requirements. Usually this involves that the actual device manufacturer / software supplier is tasked with providing all the necessary information.
Getting the correct contact in large corporations is usually a nightmare - especially for individuals. Some companies in the industry have information about licenses or about ways to retrieve the necessary information on their websites, but I don't know about BMW.
Of course that shouldn't be an excuse and they clearly acted wrong on your request.
If you are more interested on the technical side and less on the legal side of the request then I think you won't miss much anyway. All of the GPLed software components will be used as much unmodified as possible (will probably be the Kernel, glibc and some open source daemons). And the actual car related parts will not be linked to them and stay closed source.
I've also replied to my own tweets with that link. Apologies for the communication fail on my part, and thanks to HN mods for resurrecting this submission.
> I have confirmed with our technical department who advised that to access
the software download site the BMW Customer must provide the 7 digit VIN and
accept the usage rights agreement. Part of the usage rights agreement states
that the software is protected by copyright and BMW is the sole owner.
So in this case it is not subject to the requirements of a "Public" licence.
Which means that a user must prove they really are a user by inputting the digit code before getting to the code. Which is in line with the GPL.
There is a 2nd, more real problem though: "the software is protected by copyright and BMW is the sole owner". This is wrong, this is where BMW makes fraudulent claims. From the license text:
> You may copy and distribute verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice [and disclaimer of warranty]
An update on this: a BMW staff member has emailed me to say that BMW understands Copyleft, and that he's looking into the matter. I've put him in touch the with the chap who made the initial discovery, and the Free Software Conservancy. Hopefully they'll sort it out between them.
Getting the correct contact in large corporations is usually a nightmare - especially for individuals. Some companies in the industry have information about licenses or about ways to retrieve the necessary information on their websites, but I don't know about BMW.
Of course that shouldn't be an excuse and they clearly acted wrong on your request.
If you are more interested on the technical side and less on the legal side of the request then I think you won't miss much anyway. All of the GPLed software components will be used as much unmodified as possible (will probably be the Kernel, glibc and some open source daemons). And the actual car related parts will not be linked to them and stay closed source.