wget would never be even a remote consideration for them. They would hire a developer to write something before using a quality freely available tool that forced them to be open with their source code.
if they use the curl binary so they have to disclose their source code? i could see using libcurl triggering the clause...but the cli tool?? i must misunderstand gpl :(
The GPL wouldn't have relicensed the entire source tree of the car. Arguing it would doesn't make sense -- we know of many cases where similar things have happened and nobody released the source of entire products as a result. Derivative works in copyright are a very specific concept, and it's generally agreed that using the CLI interface of a program doesn't constitute a derivative work.
Or they'd have used something else to fetch files from the Internet, maybe something they wrote themselves.
It wouldn't be as robust and reliable and probably it'd have security bugs.
And the car would be a little more expensive to make, this price inevitably paid by the rest of us who want to buy the car.
The GNU plan once again foiled by one pesky developer who chose to use an MIT license!
As if no one could have developed a non-GPL licensed implementation.
GPL has its place, but berating those who have or would choose a non-copyleft license is not productive. We are all free to make licensing choices, are we not?
Except that the car companies fudging the pollution benchmarks would never use software that would require them to disclose their whole source code. At least here they are using open source tools, credit the author, and maybe some companies even contribute back to open source.
Because if you buy something you have a right to know what you're buying.
Just like I have the right to know what is in the sausages I bought for lunch, I should have the right to know what is in the .exe I bought to run my accounting system
wget is GPLv3 licensed which requires you to give users all of the information (such as firmware keys or a way of replacing the firmware keys) to replace wget.
Practically speaking this would require providing access to replace the entire system (though as you say the GPL wouldn't apply to separate programs as that is generally considered to not be a derivative work from a copyright perspective).
Interestingly GPLv2 has similar but lighter requirements -- you have to provide instructions ("scripts") on how to build and install the software. But obviously many people believe that this was not strong enough to deal with firmware-locked systems and thus GPLv3 was born.
...Which is why wget was not used. If curl had been GPLed, the car companies would have used some other tool, or made their own.
Car manufacturers are never willingly going to use software that lets drivers hack their own cars. That sucks, but don't pretend it's the third-party software devs' fault.
