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Open Source Software Transportation

Volkswagen Seeks Open-Source Approach To Refine Car Operating System (reuters.com) 43

Volkswagen wants to use an open-source approach to refine elements of a software-based car operating system being developed by the carmaker, Christian Senger, its board member responsible for digital services and software, said. From a report: With the advent of autonomous driving, carmakers have been forced to link up radar, camera and ultrasonic sensors and connect them to braking and steering components, something which requires thousands of lines of software code. "There is a race to create automotive operating systems. We are seeing that many non-automotive players are building up competence in this area," Senger told Reuters. By 2025, VW wants to increase its own share of software development on its cars to 60%, from 10% at present, and to design the electronics and vehicle architecture as well.

Volkswagen board member Thomas Ulbrich said in March that U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla has a 10-year start on rivals when it comes to building electric cars and software. "In future there will likely be fewer automotive operating systems than carmakers," Senger explained. Volkswagen will define the core operating system but may seek an open source approach to enhance elements of it. "The operating system is not something that we will control on our own. We will define its core and then quickly include open-source components, to create standards. This will create opportunities for partnerships," Senger said.

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Volkswagen Seeks Open-Source Approach To Refine Car Operating System

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  • ...but will an owner be able to turn of the surveillance features? Disabling the radio is enough.

    • The Model Year 2020 Privacy Statement applies to all Model Year 2020 Volkswagen vehicles as well as to any older vehicles if an owner or registered user agrees to the Model Year 2020 Privacy Statement.

      The types of information that VW collects from and about you and your vehicle include:

      Vehicle data transmitted from your vehicle, such as general status data (e.g., warning lights, upcoming service schedule, fuel level, battery level, tire pressure); service history and fault or trouble codes; ambient data (e.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      If it is OSS and you can build and install new firmware images, then yes. Otherwise, probably no. Although OSS that you cannot build or install still makes finding some types of vulnerabilities easier, so a "jailbreak" may become available.

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        Your opinion is irrelevant as are your values. It's not about you or what you think open source is.

        Companies value open source because they can stop paying entire departments to support proprietary code bases in favor of employing a smaller group to represent their interests in a common, shared code base. As the code base itself is not their core added value, they come out ahead. Look how IBM supported Linux when they had AIX, among other things. Companies will do this and they won't bother to even laug

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          Well for a start they need to completely abandon the idea of a central controller. The braking computer should only do braking, same as engine management, same as communications, same as the instrument display taking inputs from the other devices. Don't need them interconnected, they do not fucking do it. Do not create a super hackable death machine, just don't do it. Want to add autodrive features, add it as a separate unit on top of the rest, that supplies them inputs and does not take any, except from an

          • by kackle ( 910159 )
            You are correct in your points, but unfortunately we now live in a world of excessive technological complexity, all in the name of "features" (the goal: money), all else be damned ("...Can't fix it, so throw it out."). Since this complexity is good in some areas, it must be good everywhere! A hint that things have gone south: We didn't need to reboot anything, to get it "unstuck", twenty years ago.

            Heck, Slashdot's home page has an article about DVD players breaking simultaneously, worldwide.
    • "...but will an owner be able to turn of the surveillance features?"

      The VW that will begin selling in September doesn't even recognize your phone, much less read what's on it until some future date, when somebody has finally written the software.
      Sadly no joke.

    • by spth ( 5126797 )

      I'd suspect that some regulatory authorities will require Tivoization.

    • No. They are planning on OSS, not Free Software. You won't have the right or ability to change what is on the device.

      This is why tivoization clauses are important, and why we should use the GPL.

  • Of course! (Score:2, Flamebait)

    by pele ( 151312 )

    Let's all jump on board and write some free software for VW to use. Like they did for Google. So they can influence what we can and cannot to with our cars. Just like Google does with our phones and apps. Let's, why not. And then VW can choose not to let some arbitrarilly-chosen country import their cars or use "their" CarOS, because some "elected" idiot thinks it's funny or somesuch. I see no problem in that. Did I mention we should do it for free?

    • Reminds me of Apple's Darwin.

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      They don't want *you* to help write the car OS, but they want to work with other vehicle manufacturing companies to create the core of a standard vehicle operating system. That's what they mean by open source software. I assume there would eventually be hooks so that you could write add-ons, but that's going to be much lower priority than getting the core correct and getting peripherals like the drive train to talk to brake pedal.

    • This is the Free as in beer, not Free as in freedom thing. They want to save money, not let users run their own code.

  • Surely autonomous driving software runs into the millions, or tens of millions lines of code? Thousands is nothing. It's a quantity I can do in a good week.

    Also, I cannot imagine they would let you tinker with the software that actually controls the vehicle. That's just asking for all sorts of trouble. Presumably they mean they want to share the load with other car manufacturers... Maybe do a few hundred lines each :-(

  • by wagnerer ( 53943 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @06:21PM (#60204046)
    I'm interested in why hasn't anyone started looking at a peering protocol to allow cars to talk to one another. Something to broadcast over 1000' its current location, speed, heading, current awareness of nearby cars and what it intends to do in the next second to change any of that. Have traffic lights broadcast their current timers.
    • by gbjbaanb ( 229885 ) on Friday June 19, 2020 @07:42PM (#60204316)
    • Next time do a little research before claiming nobody has thought of something. If you did you would know that automotive mesh networks such as what you allude to have been discussed at length for the last several years.
    • Standards like DSRC (WiFi based) or C-V2X (Cellular based) are 20 years in the making, but it's only last year that they started to get minimal adoption. The European Union has currently been siding with the DSRC supporters - to the great dismay of the cellular carriers - and the technology got into production for the first time with cars like VW Golf Mk 8 (2020 year model), but then COVID19 came and sales are very low. It will be a while until we get real adoption and some practical benefits.

  • I am not aware of any open source pollution cheat software, but I am sure that could be coded pretty quickly :P
    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      For battery-powered cars, it will be rather power-utilization and capacity cheats. The display will say "charged 40kWh" while in fact they sucked 60kWh from the power-line. They'll also display "90% battery capacity left" when in fact it has already fallen to 75%.
  • If it is good enough for ATMs, why not cars?

    • by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Did any ATMs actually run Windows CE? I've seen ATMs running OS/2 (and its successor eComStation) and Windows XP Embedded/POSReady/etc. but I haven't seen any running Windows CE.

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        Yes, for a very short period of time there were a lot of different companies all making ATM machines when the hardware suddenly got reliable and there were usable drivers. There were proprietary OSs,OS2, WinCE, a really ugly interface that used (IIRC) Tron, and a video game maker even got into the act. There was a very fast industry shakeout with NEC and Deibold buying up the better ones and driving the rest out of business.

  • Wanna bet you cannot actually change the source of your car's OS, and probably can't even actually see if that is what's actually running in there.
    All you'll probably be able to do, is "contribute". To their project. For free. Aka being leeched on.

    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      No, they're going to join with other manufacturers to build a common vehicle OS core. You're not invited.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • A new platform is no big deal for VAG. It's just a matter of spending money. They haven't brought out a new platform and had it fail... Ever.

      If we are hearing about this OSS stuff now either they are full of shit or they have already been working on it for years. We're talking about a truly massive corporation here. They don't turn on a dime.

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