[billforsternz]

I recall idly looking through the manual of our Bosch dishwasher when it was delivered and seeing that they offered to share GPL'ed source code from the machine's embedded guts. I thought to myself, "that's kind of interesting, I'll take them up on that". So I emailed the address they provided for this purpose. I got an auto email back saying, effectively, "No. You're not an authorised person, we don't recognise your email address, we don't know who you are, we're not going to talk to you."

Oh well. Big Corp doing what Big Corps do. Paying lip service to legal requirements, but reluctantly and with barriers that would no doubt take a lot of time and money to even try and break down.

[billforsternz]

I was troubled by my own comment. How exactly did Bosch handle this? I went back and checked and in fact the rejection email came from their email server, it was an "access denied" type email that I originally misinterpreted as a "you don't have access" type message leaving me annoyed but really I took away and remembered a wrong impression. Looking more carefully, the message doesn't mean anything subtle, it just means the email address ([e-mail] for the record) doesn't exist. Which is bad, but not nearly as bad as I portrayed it above. Apologies (for the record) to Bosch.