Yan Wenqian Bo Yan
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With the fire of the concept of software-defined automobile, both the top management of automobile manufacturers, the decision-makers in automobile industry and the investment fund managers in capital market are full of expectations for this concept, which represents the new hope for the future development of automobile industry. But at least for the IT departments of traditional automobile enterprises, this is a nightmare.
In this new era when automotive software engineers are becoming more and more important in automotive enterprises, many new names appear on the list of the most frequently visited web pages of employees: in addition to the industrial standard network necessary for traditional mechanical engineers and various economic data websites needed by the marketing department, the developer community including GitHub, CSDN, StackOverflow and DockerHub has become an indispensable R&D reference tool for automotive enterprise engineers.
However, under the framework that traditional car companies and their IT departments regard the developer community code as a potential technology leak, these developer communities are all on the IT blacklist without exception. Any software engineer who wants to visit the developer community for help can only get an error page in the browser. Ironically, even Car.Software.Org, a software subsidiary established in audi ag for the transformation of automotive software, is no exception.
The proportion of open source projects used in codes of various industries in the world shows that
The IT department's support engineer at the headquarters in Instadt, Car.Software.Org, told think tank Jun that at present, about one-third of the daily work of the department is related to the opening of various external developer communities, and the suggestions that the department answers are always the same: in principle, it refuses and suggests that software engineers use personal computers to participate in the activities of the developer community.
The most familiar stranger: open source community
In fact, it is not surprising that traditional car companies are not interested in the open source model and the developer community.
On the one hand, since the industrial age, the major traditional automobile giants have formulated detailed intellectual property protection systems. Whether it is to disable the interface of external storage devices such as USB in the company's computer hardware or to set up sensitive words and code filtering mechanism in e-mail, in the past few decades, the most important core assets of the manufacturing industry have been the design drawings and precision production technology that have concentrated the efforts of engineers. Due to the vigilance of copying design schemes in developing countries, the enjoyment or opening of technology and patents has never played an important role in automobile enterprises.
On the other hand, as the CEO of Volkswagen Group, Herbert Diss (Herbert? Diess) said that the proportion of in-vehicle software codes mastered by traditional automobile companies is only 10%. For a long time, for the sake of cost control and stable supply chain partners, traditional car companies are more accustomed to purchasing various electronic control units directly, and the software code is written by first-class suppliers. However, in the past few decades, the focus of the software department of automobile factory has been transactional, such as formulating software architecture standards and communication standards for first-class suppliers, and adapting and integrating electronic equipment from different suppliers at the vehicle level. More and more vehicle companies even outsource the overall matching of software and hardware to engineering consulting companies.
Obsolete hardware thinking and a large number of in-vehicle software outsourcing make engineers of traditional car companies really don't need to enjoy their technical experience or basic software packages in the developer community, and they also lack enough motivation to continue learning through the developer community and open source community.
Nowadays, with the increasing proportion of in-vehicle software in vehicle research and development, the neglect of developer community and open source model is becoming one of the obstacles that hinder the traditional car companies from accelerating the transformation of software and intelligence.
The software engineer of itk, the first-class software service solution provider of BMW Group headquartered in Munich, told think tank Jun that in order to speed up software development and standardized testing, it is more and more important for software engineers to exert their subjective initiative, and flexible use of various existing codes and tools in the developer community is one of the shortcuts. Unfortunately, the legal department of the company lacks understanding of the license types of various open source projects such as GPL, LGPL, MPL and MIT, and lacks relevant legal knowledge on the conditions under which open source projects can be commercialized and profitable. This eventually led many participating enterprises in the automobile industry to waste time and energy in repeated development.
The disadvantage of the lack of developer group thinking is not only reflected in the attitude of traditional vehicle companies to external open source projects, but also in the internal enterprises, the fragmented and decentralized departmental territorial consciousness has led to a large number of repeated software development in different departments of large automobile companies.
According to think tank Jun, there is not only a lack of GitHub-like software hosting platform between parallel sub-brands such as Audi and Volkswagen, but also a lack of pan-group unified community platform between different business units of Bosch Group.
"Performance Terminator" Tesla
However, just as Tesla's Musk redefined electric vehicles almost by himself, the "performance terminator" who injected the open source model and developer community thinking into the conservative traditional automobile industry for the first time is still Tesla from Silicon Valley.
As early as June 20 14, Musk announced on his personal social media account that all Tesla's patents would be made public free of charge: "Tesla will not file a lawsuit against those who use our technology in good faith, and Tesla's patents are all open source."
Although Musk's statement was a bit "grandstanding" six years ago, after all, Tesla only opened patents related to body technology at that time, including battery management systems, autopilot and other codes that were not within the scope of open source. Doubts about Musk's hope to make electric car cakes through the open source model and even form a monopoly of technical standards have been endless. But since then, Tesla's efforts to gradually open up some autonomous driving and internal development tools have really been promoted. After the spring of 20 17, Tesla began to set up an official account on GitHub, the world's largest software hosting platform, and gradually released the authority of more than 40 software projects.
Tesla's official account on GitHub.
In 20 18, Tesla even enjoyed Autopilot's system image and Coreboot code base on GitHub. Although these core code bases have been greatly streamlined by Tesla officials, Tesla continues to maintain GitHub accounts.
Tesla, a famous technology company, is not stingy with some software codes of its own company, but also very good at using various open source projects to reduce project development time. Both operating system-related tools such as buildroot and busybox, and practical development tools similar to QT have been widely used in Tesla. To this end, Tesla and the developers of these open source projects have repeatedly clashed on whether they have complied with the license agreement.
Traditional car companies embrace open source.
The case of Tesla's perfect application of open source project is undoubtedly the Tesla version of the car operating system developed based on the kernel of open source Linux system.
As the main battlefield for vehicle manufacturers and technology companies to compete for the added value of the future industrial chain and user data, the vehicle operating system has been roughly divided into three camps: the traditional, safest and most closed BlackBerry QNX system; Open source and perfect ecosystem, security needs to be improved, and Android car operating system (AndroidAutomotive? OS)； And the Linux kernel used by both open source projects and Tesla versions of the system.
Compared with the aging QNX system and the Android car operating system currently only used by minority manufacturers represented by Polestar, Tesla's open source Linux kernel route has attracted almost all global auto giants to join.
Linux 20 14, open source project AGL(AutomotiveGrade? Linux) was originally established to accelerate the opening of the networked automotive software stack. 2065438+In April 2009, audi ag, who was determined to set up an independent software subsidiary, Car.Software.Org, officially joined AGL. If Toyota Group, one of the initiators of AGL, is added, the two world's largest automobile groups with an annual output of more than 20 million vehicles have begun to actively choose the open source project mode to accelerate the research and development of in-vehicle operating systems. According to the data given by the Linux Foundation, about 30% of the in-vehicle operating system customized by AGL alliance members according to the Linux kernel is the unique code of car companies, and the rest is the general code under the open source framework.
In addition to the research and development of in-vehicle operating system with tight time and heavy tasks, the open source model has also begun to play an important role in various research and development projects of traditional car companies.
Toyota Group invested 1 billion dollars in 20 18, and Toyota Research Institute took the lead in developing an open source autopilot simulator. In 20 19, Toyota opened 24,000 technical patents including motors and fuel cells. Before joining AGL, Volkswagen Group began to try to use Linux kernel in CAN gateway in 2008, and the results of this open source project are still applied in CERN and other scientific research institutions.
According to the data given by OliverHartkopp, an open source project expert of Volkswagen Group, the work ratio after using the open source SocketCAN is 25 million lines of open source code plus 2,000 lines of code written by Volkswagen engineers themselves.
However, there is always another side to coins.
The biggest problem that the open source project plagues automobile enterprises is safety. According to the Open Source Security and Risk Report 2020 published by Synopsys, more than 60% of the open source code inventory has vulnerabilities. Compared with paid proprietary software developers who regularly release patches and fix them, open source projects put forward higher requirements for users' software technical ability. One of the most famous cases is the security vulnerability of OpenSSL open source library under 20 14 Netscape, which finally affected more than 500,000 network servers around the world.
49% of open source projects have vulnerabilities, and 33% of open source project users have not followed the license agreement.
In addition, the use of ready-made open source software, while enjoying the convenience of Internet culture, also means that the slightly stuffy traditional vehicle manufacturers must also accept the license agreement bundled with the source code. In addition to the harsh and difficult-to-commercialize GPL protocol and generous MIT protocol, there are at least 1000 license agreements in the open source world. This even includes the bizarre "duck dance" license agreement, that is, if the vehicle manufacturer has used the results of this open source project in the in-vehicle software, then the CEO of the vehicle manufacturer must upload the video of his duck dance to social media. For Musk, this dance may be familiar, but it may be hard for people to imagine the duck dance of Herbert Diss or Akio Toyoda.
This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.