You could sniff the password with a man-in-the-middle attack, if you knew the host key of the instrument cluster. Here's one from my previous Model S: https://gist.github.com/Cyberax/ad9866ab4306d43957dc480db573...
Also, so what if they used Debian? Linux is used on everything. Debian has multiple licenses, it also has BSD3 and others to choose from: https://www.debian.org/legal/licenses/
They use plenty of GPL software there, including the Linux kernel itself.
As far as I understand, its only "derivative" works that must be open sourced. Not merely building a software program or hardware device on top of a Debian OS. Tesla's control console is hardly a derivative work.
The page you posted is a list of licenses various software in the Debian distribution are released with.
Of course the parent's idea that Tesla using Debian means they have to release the source of anything is incorrect.
