Automotive Industry Must Improve Compliance of Open Source Software

Recent studies show open source software is a major staple in the automotive industry. Considering today’s premium-class cars host over 100 million lines of code in their software, there needs to be a stricter set of guidelines.

Free and open source software (FOSS) has gained a great deal of popularity lately. The idea of free-to-modify software has been around for quite some time – one of the very first implementations being the GNU/Linux operating system.

Since FOSS is so flexible and unrestricted, any selection of software falling under this category benefits the automaker in a number of ways: It allows for the avoidance of software vendor lock-in. Proprietary software comes with a decent amount of complications, restrictions and all-around hassle. The automaker would shell out substantial amounts of money, and if he/she ever decided to implement a new function or completely change the code, it would likely have to wait until the proprietary vendor derived a solution.

Benefits of FOSS in the auto industry are obvious, but since there are no actual regulations to coding, it can cause a few setbacks. Deployment and selection of FOSS components aren’t exactly a top priority for automakers; they’re auto manufacturers, not software gurus.

“By publishing the data, companies throughout the automotive ecosystem can learn from each other about the prevalence of open source use, and the need to properly manage open source compliance and governance,” said Dr. Dirk, Professor and Head of the Open Source Institute at the University of Nuremberg.

Tim Yeaton, CEO and President at Black Duck Software (News - Alert), holds that the regulation of FOSS in the industry is absolutely imperative. “As the automotive industry continues to increase its use of FOSS across digital supply chains, it must adopt and embrace policies and processes to manage FOSS with…rigor and commitment,” he said.

Black Duck Software is the ultimate authority in open source software. It has already taken its first steps in regulating the development and deployment of FOSS in the auto industry.