We understand the crucial relevance of collaboration to learn and evolve – as an individual, as a company, as an industry, as society. And we believe in the power of Open Source to drive progress and innovation. Underscoring our ambition and spreading our mindset towards collaborative development, we have set up an Open Source Manifesto.
„Open Source is a huge enabler to moving the automotive industry forward. The collective effort accelerates innovation, reduces development costs, and ensures code quality, ” says Sanjay Lal, Chief Software Officer at CARIAD.
Guiding Principles that lead our way
Following our mission to create and deliver leading digital technology, we foster active engagement and contributions to Open Source projects wherever it is beneficial for the Volkswagen Group and the wider community. These principles will guide us on our way:
EMBRACING OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY
CARIAD strives to engage with open source communities to strengthen industry collaboration within the automotive ecosystem and beyond.
DRIVING ACTIVE CONTRIBUTION
CARIAD aims to advance the state-of-the-art in automotive software. We focus on contributing our expertise, resources, and insights to collaborative projects along design, development and operation of vehicles and associated cloud services as well as required basic software.
EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES
CARIAD enables and encourages employees to consider and contribute to relevant open source projects within their areas of responsibility. We put a great deal of trust in our software engineers and wish all to grow personally and as a corporation due to the exchange with the open source communities.
FOSTERING TRANSPARENCY
CARIAD is committed to making our contributions to open source projects transparent and readily accessible to the wider community. This includes code, documentation, and other resources.
LIVING OPEN SOURCE VALUES
CARIAD promotes openness, collaboration, diversity, technical excellence and learning culture both for individual and collective progress within our organization.
The role of Open Source for the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV)
Open Source creates a collaborative environment where developers from diverse backgrounds and organizations can contribute to and refine the software that powers modern vehicles. That is particularly important for the SDV as it signifies a paradigm shift in the development of vehicles to a software first approach.
As part of the automotive industry, we have heavily relied on using Open Source software for a long time. But we understand, are committed and have the power to influence our destiny, by upstreaming Open Source software and actively engaging with the respective communities.
“CARIAD as the software company of the Volkswagen Group has the unique scale to move the entire ecosystem forward,“ says Sanjay Lal.
By leveraging Open Source, we aim to adopt and create open solutions within the automotive software domain. This improves interoperability and reduces time-to-market for new features, advancing the state-of-the-art to build smarter, safer, and more sustainable vehicles.
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Sanjay Lal
Chief Software Officer
Joining the Zephyr Project powered by the Linux Foundation
Fostering the Open Source initiatives around real-time operating systems (RTOS), CARIAD decided to work on the Zephyr Project, together with the international developer community. We are one of the global automotive software companies actively contributing and working together advance the Zephyr Project hosted by the Linux Foundation.
CARIAD aims to empower the Zephyr community to foster the focus on automotive requirements and at the same time leveraging the outside-in perspectives beyond automotive in which Zephyr already proved well in the market.
Projects within Eclipse Foundation are making progress
Two years ago, CARIAD became a strategic member of the Eclipse Foundation, actively participating in the Open Source software development. CARIAD contributed their own projects and code for further advancement within the community, esp. individual software components originated from the VW.OS software platform.
CARIAD intends to publish soon Eclipse SommR as Open Source software, a modular and scalable functionality that enables fast ethernet communication between different components in the vehicle.
Open source refers to software whose source code is freely available for anyone to view, modify and distribute. This collaborative development model encourages transparency, innovation and community-driven advancement.
Download the Open Source Manifesto here:
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