Open Source in SDVs — It Takes a Community to Build a Community
January 19, 2024
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Welcome to the second installment of Scoping Out the Software Defined Vehicle, a series brought to you by the Eclipse Foundation to take an inside look at one of the top trends in the embedded space — software-defined vehicles. In this installment, we spoke with Christian Hort, senior vice president of automotive at T-Systems International GmbH, about building an open platform for use in SDVs.
In our last installment, we discussed with Martin Schleicher of Continental some of the difficulties in developing an open platform for use in software-defined vehicles. In this article, we’ll be continuing our examination of the crossroads between SDVs and the open source movement.
Christian Hort, senior vice president of automotive at T-Systems International GmbH, put this in very simple terms. The continued development of anything open source is dependent on a community — people creating the software and disseminating it, and other people using, modifying, and re-disseminating with their own updates. Sometimes, though, this community sees too much taking and not enough giving. People use a piece of open-source software, but then don’t add anything new into the communal space — and this is where advancement stalls.
“If everybody is kind of tense sitting, we are not progressing,” Hort said. “We only progress if everybody has the freedom and also the capabilities to inject something new toward the brokers and mature the software; and then you can take something, or your customers can take something and build it in their architecture, which we can then further support and service over the years to come.”
Now, as we touched on in the previous article, the Eclipse Foundation recently developed an SDV Working Group — the members of which are multiple key players in the rapidly advancing automotive industry — in an effort to develop an open platform for software-defined vehicles. And in light of that, it comes as little surprise that the key to continuing advancements in this area of automotive is collaboration.
Getting Some (AI)ssistance
We’ve already discussed that big tech topics are often broad, and therefore intersect frequently. But these crossroads happen for a reason. Hort also mentioned that T-Systems International GmbH has also begun making use of artificial intelligence to further their automotive advancements in a multitude of ways, but particularly in platform management, system interaction via large language models, test case documentation, and more.
And in a field that’s experiencing a lack of specialized software engineers, the helping hand from AI can be an invaluable asset in ensuring efficiency.
Stay tuned for more Scoping Out the Software Defined Vehicle content on embeddedcomputing.com.
