That has nothing to do with free software. If you have the ability to flash software then the current software on the system does not matter. Ford could make their software open source, free and anyone could download it, but it would be useless unless Ford provided a way to flash that software. The freeness of the software literally has nothing to do with this post at all.
Even if it was a free hardware problem (they showed the specs for all the hardware, providing circuit diagrams, explanations of every module, and replacement parts for every module) they still don't have to put a fucking way to flash other software in there! How can this be so fucking hard to understand? Do you think Firefox isn't FOSS because it has EME in it, which isn't provided to the public? E.g. you could never compile Firefox yourself and get Netflix to work. Firefox is provided OSS, but internal private keys are kept secret making sure that you cannot change those things about it. Do you not see the problem with your comparisons here?
As I posted elsewhere.
Okay Mr. Pedantic, this is a lack of free software AND free hardware problem.
Even if it was a free hardware problem (they showed the specs for all the hardware, providing circuit diagrams, explanations of every module, and replacement parts for every module) they still don't have to put a fucking way to flash other software in there! How can this be so fucking hard to understand? Do you think Firefox isn't FOSS because it has EME in it, which isn't provided to the public? E.g. you could never compile Firefox yourself and get Netflix to work. Firefox is provided OSS, but internal private keys are kept secret making sure that you cannot change those things about it. Do you not see the problem with your comparisons here?
Lmao exactly that