Mobile Ridesharing Service, OpenRide, Decides To Go Open Source

The highly-innovative ridesharing mobile service from Fraunhofer (News - Alert) FOKUS, OpenRide, has now been enhanced, thanks to the release of its source code. This release was made in order to improve and promote the environmentally-friendly traveling service called ridesharing. Ridesharing has been steadily growing in popularity, and being a cost effective and eco service, its development has become a high priority.

OpenRide has now become the first-ever dynamic ridesharing service software in the world to be released with an open source license. What the open source license essentially does is to allow developers to make use of the software at zero charge, while also allowing for its customization based on the business need or individual requirement.

Any person, private company, community, event organizer, entrepreneur or even a town, can now make use of open source to begin a ridesharing program to build spontaneous ridesharing as well as develop the service to get better results.

In a release, the technical project manager, Anna Kress said, “We hope that releasing the OpenRide software as open source will lead to faster increased popularity of mobile ridesharing and improved combination with other services.“

The OpenRide software enables quick search or posting of rides by both passengers and drivers using a mobile phone from anywhere at any time. While processing the ride, the OpenRide software also considers the start point, the end point, and the entire route itself, along with any available detours. This enables passengers to be picked up from or dropped off in the middle of a route as well. Using a simple standard web browser, the OpenRide software uses a combination of social media services and location-based services.

A spokesperson for Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Jan Ziesing said, “OpenRide as free software means that companies, developers and users can start their own ridesharing agency and further develop the software as well as customize it to meet individual needs. This way, new innovations and business models can be developed thus giving the mobility market an additional momentum.”

The free OpenRide software also helps in reducing the dependency of ridesharing agencies on one particular software manufacturer. In fact, various ridesharing agencies can interconnect their networks in order to better run the ridesharing services.

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