More on What Caused Volkswagen to Lose So Much Money (Proprietary Software)
TODAY we published a pair of articles about Volkswagen [1, 2]. The company is evidently in a state of crisis, which in turn means many working families (especially in Germany) face unemployment.
"The closure of the VW [Volkswagen] plants in Germany dodge the question of what role the terrible, closed source software and software based surveillance and software based emissions cheating play in the public's willingness to consider buying VW cars," a reader told us.
Volkswagen has been quite a lot in this news so far this week and the reader sent along the report "Volkswagen may close plants in Germany for first time in its history" and this reminder of the 'dieselgate' emissions scandal. It's not a solved issue yet. SFLC and many other organisations spoke out about how proprietary (secret) software enabled this scandal. The BBC says: "Martin Winterkorn was chief executive of the [Volkswagen] German company in 2015 when it was engulfed in a scandal that sent shockwaves through the entire industry. It emerged the company had been deliberately manipulating official emissions checks, building cars that could pass laboratory tests while producing illegal levels of pollution in daily use."
So there are two lessons here about proprietary software: 1) don't buy cars that are heavily loaded with it. 2) don't trust companies that use it a lot to cheat and lie. █