Automakers and suppliers are increasingly adopting open source solutions to drive rapid innovation and bring products to market faster
Volkswagen is gradually transforming from automobile manufacturer to mobility provider by investing in open source and shared development of automotive software.
Now, the German automaker has joined Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project at the Linux Foundation.
The project brings together automakers, suppliers and technology companies to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for the connected car.
Currently, AGL has more than 130 members, which are working together to develop a common platform that can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications.
Adopting an open platform across the industry enables automakers and suppliers to share and reuse the same code base, which reduces development costs, decreases time-to-market for new products and reduces fragmentation across the industry.
“The Open Source approach provides excellent software solutions that are suitable to enable a long-term support of software over the vehicle life cycle. To ensure robust and secure solutions for our customers we want to be in close connection with the community to be able to directly interact with developers and maintainers,” said Oliver Hartkopp, Open Source specialist at Volkswagen.
AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) platform
Developed through a joint effort by dozens of member companies, the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) platform is an open source software platform for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications.
It provides 70 per cent of the starting point for a production project and includes an operating system, middleware and application framework. Automakers and suppliers can customize the platform with features, services and branding to meet their unique product and customer needs.
“The automotive industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and automakers and their suppliers are increasingly adopting open source solutions, like the AGL platform, to drive rapid innovation and enable them to bring products to market faster,” asserted Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation.
Linux Foundation collaborative projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.
