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I dunno about that. I readily acknowledge that cars are a different bucket of fish, but the benefits of open-sourced firmware have been well-established in area
by livueta 6y ago
I dunno about that. I readily acknowledge that cars are a different bucket of fish, but the benefits of open-sourced firmware have been well-established in areas like routers.
It's also (hopefully) not a binary choice between OEM firmware and a clean-room from-scratch implementation. If it was I might agree, but the ideal scenario is that the OEM releases the firmware, then community members (okay, whatever, generalists and amateurs) get to fix bugs/do long-term support when the business has moved on. Complimentary rather than adversarial. For instance, even a generalist could throw some static analysis at some code and come up with a bunch of trivial (but useful!) memory correctness fixes or something like that.
- waiseristy 6y agoThe problem is that this is not the way the OEMs write the software. They are typically generated from some ecu/car/network system description using a code generator. So you get out this giant blob of optimized code which is essentially impossible to maintain, not to mention literally impossible to push to the upstream. On top of that, there are 10-30 ECU's in modern cars (often of 3-4 different SKUs), all with similar, but distinct code blobs. You would need a complete description of the cars network topology, the entire toolchain used to build the software and deploy it, the extremely expensive debug HW to debug it, and so on. The open source community does not develop software the same way OEMs develop software
- livueta 6y agoInteresting, thanks for clarifying. Those do seem like big challenges.