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You make all kind of assumptions about the sophistication behind and engine ECU. It's one of the most complex ECU's in the car. Just as car companies may just

by kaftoy 11y ago

You make all kind of assumptions about the sophistication behind and engine ECU. It's one of the most complex ECU's in the car. Just as car companies may just sell cars, Dell or Apple just sell computers. Why not provide the source code which comes with a new Dell/Apple laptop? In the end, how can a car maker, using Windows/Apple SW to build the SW for the cars, can trust them to not mess up? They are part of the tool chain for making cars. For a car maker to provide source code, they would have to get permission from a lot of people. In this case, from Bosch. Bosch would require permission from their own OS supplier (probably Etas' RTA-OSEK/RTA-OS) and from other 3rd party suppliers. To be clear, these technologies are not directly available to the car maker. They never get complete source code from suppliers (unless some special agreement, but I doubt it). They can audit the SW/process though, which implies some level of access. The engine ECU may not contain the new hype controls of self driving, but it contains a lot of know how, inventions, innovations. It's very nice to have a smooth running car, but it takes a lot of tech to make it run like this.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Apparently not. Look at Toyota's ECU when they finally were forced to reveal it - total crap. Disambiguating claims of company secrets, from the reality of coverups, is the whole point. You gotta point to one that has any real valuable secret before claiming they'll lose anything by it. And no they don't have to reveal the source to the OS, that's a strawman.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  You're massivley underestimating the impact that open sourcing would have because you're assuming that these software quality metrics whose utility is substantiated with correlative evidence will have any causal significance post-open-sourcing regime. If you tell companies they have to open source, you can be sure they'll be MISRA-C compliant. That doesn't mean their code is any less shit. Things like MISRA-C are useful in large part because where they are violated, you can be sure there was sloppy engineering. Giving people incentives to game standards whose claim to significance is largely correlative only guarantees that those standards become meaningless. In order for open sourcing to be useful, you need to analyze the code against some form of specification that concisely captures what that code is supposed to be doing, not just the absence of certain low-level errors or coding patterns highly indicative of certain low-level errors. > And no they don't have to reveal the source to the OS, that's a strawman. Why? A major bug in the OS would almost certainly make it impossible to provide any guarantees about the behavior of the ECU. And that OS is probably used in a lot of other safety-critical settings. Sorry, but I still completely fail to see how your position isn't simply "primarily software companies deserve IP protections / primarily car companies don't". > Disambiguating claims of company secrets, from the reality of coverups, is the whole point. You're massively underestimating that amount of money car companies invest in both R&D and in engineering of software (Hell, car companies definitely spend more on CS R&D than the average software company, even if you restrict that to software companies working in safety-critical industries). This flippant attitude toward million/billlion dollar software investments based upon what companies happened to write that software is not going to fly outside of tech bubbles.

by kaftoy 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Apparently not. Look at Toyota's ECU when they finally were forced to reveal it - total crap. Disambiguating claims of company secrets, from the reality of coverups, is the whole point. You gotta point to one that has any real valuable secret before claiming they'll lose anything by it. And no they don't have to reveal the source to the OS, that's a strawman.

nmrm2 11y ago
You're massivley underestimating the impact that open sourcing would have because you're assuming that these software quality metrics whose utility is substantiated with correlative evidence will have any causal significance post-open-sourcing regime. If you tell companies they have to open source, you can be sure they'll be MISRA-C compliant. That doesn't mean their code is any less shit. Things like MISRA-C are useful in large part because where they are violated, you can be sure there was sloppy engineering. Giving people incentives to game standards whose claim to significance is largely correlative only guarantees that those standards become meaningless. In order for open sourcing to be useful, you need to analyze the code against some form of specification that concisely captures what that code is supposed to be doing, not just the absence of certain low-level errors or coding patterns highly indicative of certain low-level errors. > And no they don't have to reveal the source to the OS, that's a strawman. Why? A major bug in the OS would almost certainly make it impossible to provide any guarantees about the behavior of the ECU. And that OS is probably used in a lot of other safety-critical settings. Sorry, but I still completely fail to see how your position isn't simply "primarily software companies deserve IP protections / primarily car companies don't". > Disambiguating claims of company secrets, from the reality of coverups, is the whole point. You're massively underestimating that amount of money car companies invest in both R&D and in engineering of software (Hell, car companies definitely spend more on CS R&D than the average software company, even if you restrict that to software companies working in safety-critical industries). This flippant attitude toward million/billlion dollar software investments based upon what companies happened to write that software is not going to fly outside of tech bubbles.