- the law could even go the opposite direction, giving consumers a
right to have software inspected and modified. Many countries already have laws giving consumers choice in other areas (e.g. the choice to have their car serviced at any garage and not just with the franchise where they bought it) so why shouldn't they have the same right of choice with software?
VW's fraudulence puts the public in a potent position to demand serious changes such as publishing complete corresponding source code. Strongly copylefted free software (such as AGPL v3 or later) will help users against future fraud and possibly make the affected vehicles trustworthy and saleable again. It would be good if VW drivers, for instance, could get complete corresponding source code for their entire car licensed under the AGPL v3 or later so they could take that code to someone they trust and know that whatever work was done to that code would also respect their software freedom. Non-copylefted free software under some pushover license could be extended with nonfree code and thus stop being valuable in the foreseeable short-term future, recapitulating the very problem that led to this fraud in the first place. A proper fix will mandate that all distributed code must be free and ensure that freedom travels with the code.