The lack of attention to the developer community and the open source model is becoming one of the obstacles that hinder the traditional car companies from accelerating the transformation of software and intelligence.
Wen Yan Qian Boyan
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With the fire of software-defined automobile concept, both the senior management of automobile manufacturers, the decision makers of automobile industry and the investment fund managers of 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 department of traditional automobile enterprises, it is a nightmare.
in this new era when automotive software engineers are becoming more and more important in automobile enterprises, many new names have appeared on the list of the most frequently visited websites of employees: in addition to the standard websites necessary for traditional mechanical engineers and various economic data websites needed by the marketing department, developer communities including GitHub, CSDN, StackOverflow and DockerHub have become indispensable R&D reference tools for automobile enterprise engineers.
However, in the current framework of traditional car companies and their IT departments, which 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 in Car.Software.Org, a software subsidiary specially set up by Volkswagen Group for automobile software transformation, it is no exception.
The proportion of open source projects used in the codes of various industries in the world shows that
Car.Software.Org The IT department support engineer in Ingstadt, Germany, revealed to think tank Jun that at present, about one third of the daily work of the department is related to opening various external developer communities, and the suggestions answered by the department are always the same: in principle, it is rejected, and software engineers are advised to use personal computers to participate in activities in the developer communities.
The most familiar stranger: the open source community
In fact, it is not surprising that traditional automobile companies have little interest in the open source model and the developer community.
on the one hand, the major traditional automobile giants have already formulated detailed intellectual property protection systems since they grew up in the big industrial era. 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 the e-mail, in the past few decades, the most important core assets of the manufacturing industry have always been the design drawings and precise production technology that have concentrated the efforts of engineers. For the sake of being wary of the replica design scheme of the late-developing countries, the enjoyment or openness of technology and patents has never played an important role in the automobile enterprises.
On the other hand, just as Herbert Diss, CEO of Volkswagen Group (Herbert? Diess) said that the proportion of vehicle software codes mastered by traditional automobile enterprises is only 1%. For a long time, for the sake of cost control and stable supply chain partners, traditional car companies are more accustomed to directly purchasing all kinds of electronic control units with software codes written from first-class suppliers. In the past decades, however, the focus of the software department of the 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 whole matching of software and hardware to engineering consulting companies.
Obsolete hardware thinking and extensive outsourcing of in-vehicle software make it really unnecessary for engineers of traditional car companies to enjoy their technical experience or basic software packages in the developer community, and they also lack sufficient 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 lack of attention to the developer community and open source model is becoming one of the obstacles that hinder the traditional car companies to accelerate the transformation of software and intelligence.
The software engineers of itk, a 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 increasingly 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 company's legal department 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 to many participating enterprises in the automobile industry having to waste time and effort in repeated development.
The disadvantage of the lack of thinking in the developer community is not only reflected in the attitude of traditional vehicle manufacturers towards external open source projects, but also in the fragmented and decentralized departmental territorial awareness within enterprises, which leads to a large number of repeated software development in different departments of large automobile enterprises.
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 among different business units of Bosch Group.
"showstopper" Tesla
However, just as Musk of Tesla redefined electric vehicles almost by himself, the "showstopper" that injected the open source model and developer community thinking into the conservative traditional automobile industry on a large scale for the first time is still Tesla from Silicon Valley.
As early as June 214, Musk announced on his personal social media account that all Tesla's patents would be made public for free: "Tesla will not sue those who use our technology in good faith, and Tesla's patents are all open source."
Although Musk's statement six years ago was somewhat "grandstanding", after all, Tesla only opened the patents related to car body technology at that time, and the codes including battery management system and Autopilot were not within the scope of open source. There have been endless doubts about Musk's hope to make electric car cakes through open source mode and even form a monopoly of technical standards. However, since then, Tesla's efforts to gradually open source some Autopilot and internal development tools have been really promoted. After the spring of 217, Tesla began to set up an official account on GitHub, the world's largest software hosting platform, and began to gradually liberalize the permissions of more than 4 software projects.
Tesla's official account on GitHub
In p>218, Tesla even enjoyed the Autopilot system image and the Coreboot code base on GitHub. Although these core code bases have been greatly streamlined by Tesla officials, Tesla has continued to maintain GitHub accounts.
in addition to enjoying some software codes of its own company, Tesla, which is a famous technology company, is 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 erupted conflicts 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 projects is undoubtedly the Tesla Version car operating system developed based on the open source Linux system kernel.
As the main battlefield for vehicle companies and technology companies to compete for the added value of the future industrial chain and user data, the vehicle operating system can be roughly divided into three camps: the traditional, the most secure and the most closed BlackBerry QNX system; Open source and perfect ecosystem, security needs to be improved, and the Android car operating system (AndroidAutomotive? OS）； And the Linux kernel used by both open source projects and Tesla Version system.
compared with the aging QNX system and the Android car operating system currently used only by minority manufacturers represented by Polestar, the open source Linux kernel route chosen by Tesla has attracted almost all global car giants to join.
Linux p>214, the open source project AGL(AutomotiveGrade? Linux) was established with the original intention of accelerating the open networked automotive software stack. In April 219, Volkswagen Group, which was determined to set up an independent software subsidiary, Car.Software.Org, officially joined AGL. If Toyota Group, one of the sponsors of AGL, is added, the two largest automobile groups in the world with an annual output of more than 2 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 3% of the codes in the in-vehicle operating system customized by AGL alliance members according to the Linux kernel are exclusive codes unique to car companies, and the rest are general codes under the open source framework.
apart from the research and development of on-board 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 Research Institute led the Toyota Group to invest 1 million dollars to develop an open-source autopilot simulator in 218. In 219, Toyota opened 24, technical patents including motors and fuel cells. Before joining AGL, Volkswagen Group began to try to use Linux kernel in CAN gateway in 28, and the results of this open source project are still applied in scientific research institutions such as CERN.
according to the data given by OliverHartkopp, an expert of open source project of Volkswagen Group, the working ratio after using open source SocketCAN is 25 million lines of open source code plus 2, lines of code written by Volkswagen engineers themselves.
However, there is always another side to the coin.
the biggest problem that the open source project plagues automobile enterprises is still safety. According to the Open Source Security and Risk Report 22 released by Synopsys, more than 6% of the open source code inventory is vulnerable. 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 OpenSSL open source library security vulnerability incident of Netscape in 214, which ultimately affected more than 5, network servers around the world.
49% of open source projects have vulnerabilities, and 33% of users of open source projects have not followed the license agreement.
In addition, the use of ready-to-use open source software, while enjoying the cultural convenience of the Internet, 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 a thousand license protocols 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, the dance may have been familiar, but it may be hard for people to imagine the duck dance of Herbert Diss or Akio Toyoda.
This article comes from the author of Chejia, car home, and does not represent car home's standpoint.