Wind River is joining Intel to develop an open source Linux platform to your car and shake up the auto industry by bringing greater innovation, efficiency and development speed to the emerging in-car infotainment market.
It's a radical effort to force automakers -- which tend to favor evolutionary, not revolutionary, R&D - to embrace open source as a way to speed up development. If Wind River and Intel pull it off, it would be a crucial step toward spurring innovation and cooperation in the growing but fractured in-car multimedia market.
"To have an open system that allows, say, navigation providers to write code and software is a milestone idea if it works the way it's being talked about," says Thilo Koslowsk, an analyst with Gartner. "But we'll have to see how open it really is."
And how open the automakers are to playing along.
Wind River will make the specs and code for the platform available on the open source vehicle infotainment site Moblin.org in August. The idea is to have vendors and
Linux users collaborate on software, contribute code and debug programs. The platform is optimized for Intel's new Atom processor, which Wind River says is perfect for in-car applications that require intensive multimedia and graphic support in a low-power environment.
Automakers have been known to work with one another when it suits their purposes, but they aren't known for taking a collective approach to anything. And their tendency to be cautious means things tend to happen at a snail's pace -- exactly the opposite of what happens in the electronics and software industries. But BMW and mega-suppliers Bosch and Delphi have lined up behind Wind River, which says the platform will offer plug-and-play compatibility for products like Nuance's voice communications, Parrot's Bluetooth applications and Gracenote's music management system.
"Mobile infotainment products are undergoing a dramatic technology shift as multimedia, communications and consumer devices converge in the automobile," says Robert W. Schumacher, head of advanced products and business development at Delphi. He says a Linux-based open source platform "breaks down silos of adjacent industries" and could hasten the marriage of consumer electronics to the automobile.
Koslowski concedes the auto industry's insular nature is the biggest impediment to an open source platform, but he says automakers need some helping keeping up with the pace of development for in-car gadgetry and software. "You have to have reliable solutions as a vehicle manufacturer," he says. "In the car things have to work, and not just 'good enough,' the way people are used to with portable devices."
But it's that need to have things work perfectly that might make automakers leery of an open source approach. Koslowski says Wind River will have to prove the automakers can count on an open source platform isn't going to be more trouble than it's worth. "They have to demonstrate that you're not giving up reliability in exchange for opening up the system," he says.
Companies like Microsoft, which has made huge investments and major inroads in the auto industry recently with Ford's wildly popular Sync system, aren't likely to be happy competing against Linux in another arena.
Photo: Flickr user Sidereal.
