I believe there would be more interest in having research and development in this industry, even if it is not a goal to produce a physical vehicle but to develop the underlying software instead. However, as far as I’m aware, none of these organizations are as aligned as Purism with the FSF’s ideals and I know Purism would do as much as they can to follow them. For what it’s worth, Purism has talked about the software in cars back in 2021.
Kyle Rankin has previously expressed interest in electric vehicles, though mentioned the same privacy concerns as most of us have.
I’m also looking forward to my next car being electric (which will be some time, I tend to drive my cars until they need things like new engines) but if I don’t have an option to get one without smartphone spyware and other similar “features” I may look into the aftermarket “electrification” of an old car
perhaps by then there will be more of those options available
there are already some shops in California that have drop-in kits for older VW cars
The problem statement for this is entirely accurate, but I have an even bigger sense of the concentration of evil and power in that industry being unbeatable. With the phones, legally mandating that they only work a certain way makes less sense because the whole, “It’s a matter of life and death!” argument makes no sense, so if there was a law passed that only Android and iOS were allowed, it would be obvious for the anti-consumer bollocks that it was.
But the auto industry can always hide behind the claim that a user-modifiable car would put the user at risk of killing other people if it had a software failure, and thus legally require that only software from the major car companies should be allowed. I can imagine it would be pretty hard or impossible to defeat that.
Maybe a better idea is to not have a car at all. This is what I have been doing. That way, when you need to go to a store, you can walk. This is an excellent source of exercise, and it reduces your carbon footprint by a large amount, contributing to the survival of our species.
Not to mention (foldable) electric bicycles, scooters, etc.
Imagine if the gooberments didn’t get lobbied by ford and chrysler and they went ahead and built rail everywhere. Imagine if people weren’t so headstrong about having a car and driving it even one block away to the convenience store…
Cities could be so different. The air could be so much cleaner. North america could have high speed trains between cities and much more robust and reliable public transit within cities and towns, too.
Imagine if we built vertical and had state of the art designs and real antimonopoly regulations for food, housing, tech, and everything else.
If you like science and reason, check out the Pirate Party in your area.
I feel like this should be my speech and I should run for president but, let’s not go there. Lol.
PureOS and GNU/Linux in general needs an incredible amount of work to have anything to do with vehicles. That being said, don’t teslas run on Ubuntu? Where’s the source code for what they’ve done? Maybe there is hope, after all.
Another possible area of opportunity could be the electrical share scooters and bicycles that you see in many cities nowadays. To use them you have to install an app. It would be great if Purism could provide a privacy respecting software solution for these electrical share scooters and bicycles. Municipalities should demand privacy guarantees from these mobility providers in order to get a permit. The same can apply to personal electrical scooters and bicycles. An open platform could boost innovation in this area.
I agree with the general point and I think it has been made elsewhere in this forum. However there is room to move with
open source, so can be fully verified, but can’t ever be modified (locked bootloader with trusted boot path thereafter) - so, yes, very unsatisfying but better than complete blackbox, OR
open source, with the core software locked, but still allowing a lot of user flexibility to change other software.
To some extent the same problem does exist with mobile phones - because the government can argue:
we regulate the radio frequency spectrum, and
if users had complete flexibility to modify the software in their RF implementations (whether WiFi or cellular) then it would be impossible to guarantee correct regulation.
I’m not saying that I want that to be the case for mobile phones, only that the government might try to argue it.
Of course we shouldn’t exactly assume that just because software comes from a “major car company” that it is without software defects.
The EU has proposed “outlawing” open source software in this context by making the source of the source code legally liable i.e. in practice that would be very detrimental to the open source universe.
The problem with pursuing automotive solutions is that car companies are not likely to install privacy respecting software in their vehicles. Car companies get paid to report owner driving data to insurance companies. Yes, your car is monitoring how you drive and insurance companies use this data to set the rates you pay for insurance. This is a fact and is verifiable.
