Saturday, October 25, 2008

BMW cars may run open source software

[ Update: Forgot to mention - I got to know of this via a tweet from Jeremiah Owyang, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research. ]

So now it looks like even car manufacturers like BMW are planning to get into the benefits of open source software - in this case, software that will actually run their cars, not just software that powers their factories or offices.

See here.

And the source of that news is here.

That last link above gives the reasons for these possible moves by BMW, and mentions that other car makers like GM, Chrysler, Ford, Honda and Toyota are also interested in this idea - developing an open source software platform for software that runs cars.

The idea seems to make sense - particularly if they collaborated with each other on such software, they could save a lot of money (by reducing duplication of effort) via shared software development costs. Of course for that, the software in each maker's cars would have to run on the same (or compatible) hardware, but there's some talk along those lines in the article.

Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises.

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