It was a busy week for the Eclipse Foundation as the group introduced a new operating system for distributed devices and opened the list of calls for software defined design for an open source vehicle.
The aim of the latter, according to the Foundation, is to create a vendor-independent and open source approach to automotive software development. “Software-defined vehicles,” the group said, “will enable vehicle manufacturers as well as car suppliers to put software at the heart of vehicle development, following hardware considerations.”
Your engine has a problem and had to shut down
Members include Bosch and Microsoft, and while the latter’s involvement may make some wonder what shape the car designed by Redmond would take (and the obvious jokes that follow), the former has long been a big buzz in the world of cars and has posted own attitude to the software-defined vehicle (SWdV.)
Red Hat and SUSE, who last year spoke of their desire to push the Kubernetes behind the wheel, also involved.
It is fair to say that there is not much salivation in the industry from the additional revenue streams that are potentially offered as cars continue to become smarter. Subscriptions, over-the-air updates and software upgrades are everything becoming a reality despite strange hiccups or two (such as Tesla’s full self-driving software, which was in beta he turned back sharply last week.)
“Today,” Bosch said, “a vehicle is in its best condition when it leaves the factory. But in the future, the software can be continuously optimized within the hardware.”
The Eclipse initiative aims to keep things independent of suppliers, while allowing manufacturers to work on differentiating customer characteristics while building from the open foundation. “Although we have extensive roots with the automotive community, a project of this scope and scale has never been tried before,” said Mike Milinkovic, CEO of the Eclipse Foundation.
The initiative comes in the same week as the introduction of The Oniro Project, an operating system aimed at providing an alternative to established IoT and Edge operating systems.
Milinkovic described Oniro as a “properly made open source” because, we assume, describing Oniro as “an open source implementation of HarmanyOS based on HarmanyOS, donated by Huawei to OpenAtom” is probably a bit of a bite.
The Brussels-based Eclipse Foundation and the first Chinese OpenAtom open source foundation, announcements “strategic initiative focused on OpenHarmony” last month and now we are here.
The plan is that by creating a compatible implementation of OpenHarmony, the applications created for Oniro will run on OpenHarmony and vice versa. Industrial and IoT applications are expected to be first in line.
Although the Eclipse Foundation can be proud of its openness and transparency, it will be interesting to see what Western governments, which are clearly holding their noses, will do when the word “Huawei” is mentioned. ®