
BMW seeking partners for open-source car software platform - mariorz
http://www.motorauthority.com/bmw-seeking-partners-for-open-source-car-software-platform.html
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iigs
I'm not entirely sure what aspects of car computing they're talking about
here, but from what little meat there is it sounds like they're talking about
entertainment and some body control (heat/ac/radio/nav/dvd), not the (to me)
more interesting engine/transmission/traction control units.

If my assessment is correct, they're missing a simpler and better opportunity
here: the ability to standardize physical/electrical interfaces for these
subsystems.

It will be great that they can save 15% (maybe) of their development costs on
their nav system interface, but they're still going to be behind the curve
when it comes to innovation in this growing space. For example, if the latest
craze in in car entertainment were to be a docking station for your Game Boy,
they're no further ahead than they were. If the standards were open, the
aftermarket could sell a device that would plug in to the harness and
integrate seamlessly.

The iPod was a lesson here, and I'm not convinced that anyone sees it as an
instance of a generic class of problem -- only a technology that they had to
eventually figure out how to cooperate with.

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baguasquirrel
So that got me thinking... an interesting question to ask would be: how do you
implement "ship early, ship often" for the software running a car. That mantra
has been one of the key facets of open source culture. We ship beta versions,
for the hackers who care, and the hardcore folks can just svn checkout the
trunk. Bugs get caught early, blah blah blah.

Obviously, it'd be a hard pill to swallow-- just dropping beta software into
your shiny new BMW.

So if two BMWs from different product generations could share mostly the same
API, standardized protocols, etc., well then we could test stuff with the old
E46 before dropping it into the new E92...

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iigs
A few different possibilities:

Phase one:
[http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=1099...](http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Features/articleId=109902)

Legacy form factor mules with advanced technology in them.

Phase two: Performance tuning shops often pick up early versions of cars to
start testing, looking for saleable mods, and adapting their lines to the new
products. I would expect we'd start seeing reflashes for systems within a few
months of a vehicle release

Phase three: As platform N depreciates and platform N+1 goes into production,
N-class cars start falling into the hands of people more willing to cut them
open and hack (track/hobby cars). If N and N+1 run the same code
(project/source level, not binaries), features could be committed by
individual hackers and could be picked up by manufacturers as desired.

Of course this is all predicated on this release being a real, public, open
source project. If their desire/intent is to create an open source platform so
that 2-5 manufacturers can share IP, it's possible that we'll never see the
infrastructure to flash things ourselves, in which case this is all a big fat
stinky dead end. :/

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ph0rque
How about the OScar project (<http://www.theoscarproject.org/>)?

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DaniFong
As far as I could tell there's not much there.

We're going to be authoring our own software. We'll open source it once we're
done, but we're not going to let partnerships slow us down in this phase.

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gcheong
Maybe they'll provide free platforms for developers to live test their code
changes.

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cbrinker
(Woot, BMW!) :D

~~~
cbrinker
Psh, haters.

