The Eclipse Foundation, together with several companies in the industry, including Bosch and Microsoft, has now extended an open invitation to technology leaders to participate in defining a new working group specifically focused on the "Software-Defined Vehicle". The goal is to create a vendor-independent open source ecosystem with a vibrant community of contributors focused on laying the foundation for a new era of automotive software development. The announcement serves as a call for all interested parties to join this initiative and help shape the future of mobility.

An open source revolution?

Developers of next-generation vehicles are now turning to software-based solutions for their new designs. The Eclipse Foundation is convinced that this will lead to an open source revolution resulting in software-defined vehicles. These will enable vehicle manufacturers and automotive suppliers to put software at the center of vehicle development, while hardware will be considered later.

"We are very excited to be developing this new project here at the Eclipse Foundation. Although we have deep roots in the automotive industry, a project of this scope and scale has never been undertaken before," said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. "This initiative allows participants to participate at the grassroots level and ensure they have an equal voice in this project."

An open source runtime environment

To achieve this transformation in the development process, the new working group will lay the foundation for an open ecosystem for deploying, configuring and monitoring vehicle software in a secure way. Vehicle manufacturers around the world can use this foundation to focus on differentiating customer features such as mobility services and end-user experience improvements, while saving time and costs on non-differentiating elements such as operating systems, middleware or communication protocols.

To support the transition to software-defined vehicles, key players from the technology and automotive industries are encouraged to jointly develop an open source runtime environment for in-vehicle applications, cloud-based vehicle operations and highly integrated development toolchains. The ultimate goal of the open source software-defined vehicle initiative is to scale in-vehicle software across vehicle models, product lines, brands, organizations and timeframes.

The Eclipse Foundation, with its decades of experience in managing complex technology initiatives and multi-vendor organizations, sees itself as the ideal institution to lead such an endeavor. For more information, please contact the Eclipse Foundation's Software-Defined Vehicle initiative at sdv.eclipse.org.