By Nathan Willis
August 8, 2012
The third annual Texas Linux Fest (TXLF)
hosted sessions on a range of technical subjects in San Antonio August
3-4 — plus some lesser-known projects that also centered around open
source software. An
example of the latter was the report from TexOS, a volunteer project that not only
provides school kids with computers, but teaches them about open
source as well. The project is gearing up for its third instructional
cycle, and is looking to expand what it offers.
What it does
The TexOS session was led by Brian Beck, a faculty development staffer
at Angelo State University (ASU), and Dr. George Pacheco, Jr, an ASU
communications professor. Beck has previously worked with the HeliOS
Project, an Austin-based initiative that restores and donates Linux computers to
economically disadvantaged children. TexOS is based in San Angelo, but
it differs from HeliOS in another way, too. While HeliOS's mission is
refurbishing and supporting the donated computers (and doing so in
large numbers), TexOS works with smaller groups of students, providing
a multi-week training class that introduces them to Linux and open
source.
TexOS gets hardware donations from businesses and colleges in the
area and it receives referrals from teachers and local nonprofits about
potential students. The students must apply to the program, however,
and sign a contract. The terms boil down to "be respectful and
show up," Beck said, and is primarily a means for the students
to take ownership of their participation.
The first round of classes was held in September and October of 2011,
and involved students in grades six through eight. The second round
was held in February and March of 2012, and involved slightly older
students, in grades eight through ten. That age range is a better fit
for several reasons; Beck noted that the older students have greater
need for a computer since their homework involves more research and
writing. Pacheco also joked that the older students were "a
little more receptive toward sitting still."
In both rounds, the curriculum is broken up into six sessions spread
out over three consecutive Saturdays. An outline of the first round's
curriculum is listed on the TexOS
project site; it covers topics from installing Linux to using common
desktop applications for homework, while exploring basic system
administration and shell commands along the way. But there are also
non-technical subjects on the agenda, such as collaborative learning,
ethical use of root privileges, and fair use of copyrighted
material.
About the curriculum, Beck said that it is a common misconception that
schoolchildren of today are "digital natives" (meaning
that they have been using technology practically since birth, and have
no problems adopting it). While that might have been true ten years
ago, he said he has found the kids of today function more like
"digital zombies" instead: taking technology for granted,
taking no interest in how it works, and not knowing what to do when
flipping the "on" switch fails. Thus it is important to teach kids
about the technology under the hood, hopefully encouraging them to
start hacking on their own.
Extending the concept
Beck said that the project is currently setting up for its third round
of classes, to be held in October. This time, the team hopes to
bring back students from the 2011 sessions to act as mentors to the
new class. It is also looking at expanding to four Saturdays, to
cover more scientific applications in the lessons. He also asked
for input from the audience about how else to expand the curriculum.
One area he would like to explore is introducing the students to
programming, but, as he is not a software developer himself, he would
prefer to find a quality curriculum developed elsewhere. A few
members of the audience had suggestions for such material, but there
are surprisingly few projects out there, particularly those designed
for a classroom environment. The project would also like to find a
viable solution for helping its students with Internet access, Beck
said, given that most of the pupils are from lower-income households.
As yet, TexOS has not found an affordable option.
Pacheco addressed the project's other new goal: developing a more
formal way to assess the students' progress. He requires his own
college students to participate in volunteer activities as part of the
"service
learning" model, and is interested in getting more of them
to work with TexOS. Although the TexOS curriculum sets learning
objectives for the complete course and for each session, Pacheco would
like to see it develop a more structured method for measuring each
student's success — both in learning his or her way around the
operating system, and in the regular classroom.
Both metrics present challenges. It is difficult to measure a
student's aptitude with technology, and privacy concerns mean that the
project cannot simply look at a student's grades to assess academic
success. But it is a critical step to take for the project, Pacheco
said. The project needs to know where the students are and are not
benefiting from the course. He did not yet have a plan for
incorporating assessment into the curriculum, and was instead
interested in hearing from audience members.
The question-and-answer portion of the session took up about a quarter
of the allotted time. There were evidently more than a few educators
in the audience, and many of them had suggestions for Beck and
Pacheco. One of them suggested that teaching programming might be
difficult to fit into a short-run weekend class, and that perhaps a
continuing-education model might make more sense, with programming as
a more advanced topic.
Price versus freedom
I have attended talks on open source in education at a variety of
conferences in recent years, and while in some respects TexOS is
pursuing a program akin to larger projects (such as HeliOS), it
actually has a unique spin on the subject. Most of the projects
that utilize refurbished computers fitted with Linux place the
emphasis on access to the Internet and affordable software — in
essence, making the argument for Linux and open source based on
price.
But while it is certainly true that free software lowers the
barrier to entry for software by eliminating (or almost eliminating)
the price issue, making that the only selling point risks
inadvertently teaching the student that open source is "okay for now,"
but can be dispensed with later when money is not as tight. The TexOS
curriculum makes a stronger pitch, teaching the students about the
principles behind open source.
Hopefully, in the coming years that curriculum will be expanded,
perhaps even teaching programming. As Beck said, educating students
about open source software is a "teach them to fish" operation: if
they are trained not to hack on their technology, there are limits to
what they will learn — whether Linux is under the hood or
not.
Comments (6 posted)
By Nathan Willis
August 7, 2012
Adobe surprised many in open source circles with its August 2 release
of Source Sans Pro, an open font made available under the standard SIL
Open Font License (OFL). Adobe has not historically been an open
source player (beyond its involvement with standard file formats like
PDF or SVG), so Source Sans Pro is not only its first foray into open
fonts, but may also herald an interest in adopting open source
development methods.
Designer Paul Hunt announced the font in a post
on the Adobe typography blog. The font is available in six
weights, with regular and italic versions for each. The first release
covers an extended Latin character set, but according to the comments
other writing systems are reportedly still to come. Downloads are hosted
at SourceForge.net.
Hunt said Adobe created the new font to provide a user interface (UI)
font for the company's open source software projects, including its Strobe media playback framework and Brackets code editor, both of which are web applications.
An open font allows Adobe to control the UI by delivering the font to
the user's browser via CSS's @font-face rule.
The design of the font is inspired by early-20th-Century gothics from
American Type Founders, such as News Gothic and Franklin Gothic, but
it is the original work of Hunt and not a derivative of those
originals. This distinction is a subtle one, but comparing Source
Sans Pro to News Cycle
(which is my own open font designed as a faithful revival of News
Gothic), there are clear differences. In addition to miscellaneous
differences between specific glyphs, Source Sans Pro is set wider, is
a bit rounder, includes a bit more contrast, and incorporates a
different approach to accents. Hunt said in the blog post that he
intentionally paid attention to distinguishing between l (lower-case
L), I (upper-case i), and 1 (the numeral), which was a less common
concern a century ago.
Although the font covers "only" Latin characters, the
implementation supports a wide array of languages that use the
variations of the basic Latin alphabet (such as additional base
characters and diacritic marks). Some of the languages supported,
such as Vietnamese, Romanized Chinese, Navajo, and various Eastern
European languages, are often under-served by even the commercial font
industry. The font also includes some typographic features often
omitted from open fonts, such as old-style or "text figure"
numerals and alternate styles of various letters (such as variations
of I (upper-case i) with and without horizontal top- and bottom-caps,
which can further distinguish it from l and 1).
There are also Multiple Master (MM) versions of the fonts included in the
release, which is unusual. MM fonts are a rarely-employed format
developed at Adobe, in which a set of parameters (usually weight and
width) can be adjusted at will to change the appearance of the font.
For example, an MM font might ship with an Extra Light and an Extra Black
version, representing the lightest and darkest ends of the weight
spectrum. The user can then use MM to interpolate smoothly between
these extremes to find the right look for the project at hand. It is
a clever idea, and spares the designer the overhead of producing
separate versions for Extra Light, Light, Demi Bold, Bold, Extra Bold,
and so on, ad nauseum.
Similarly, the differences between Condensed and Extra Wide
versions can be interpolated to produce various widths in between.
Software could naively interpolate between two widths of a non-MM
font, too, but the naive approach produces undesirable results (such
as fattening or squeezing the line widths in addition to the open
spaces of the characters). The MM format is designed to produce
eye-pleasing output. In practice, though, most people rarely use
more than one or two weight or width variations, so MM has not taken
the world by storm.
Building
The release itself is in the form of Zip archives, one of which
contains the fonts themselves in both TrueType and OpenType CFF
format, and one of which contains the fonts plus the source files used
to generate them. The contents of the source package will not be easy
to take advantage of for Linux users, however. It consists of spline
font sources (in Postscript .SFA format), sources for the proprietary
Fontlab editor (in .VFB format), and a set of auxiliary text files
used by Adobe's build tools. These text files contain information
such as hinting, kerning pairs, and tables of characters composed out
of other components (primarily accented letters). The auxiliary files
are built for use with Adobe Font
Development Kit for OpenType (AFDKO), Adobe's "font SDK."
AFDKO implements the font-building portion of Adobe's font development
workflow. The glyph outlines are developed in a separate application
(such as Fontlab) in PostScript Type 1 format. AFDKO includes
proofing and validation tools, plus scripts that add OpenType
features (such as substitution rules or stylistic alternates)
based on text configuration files like those included with the Source
Sans Pro package. It also includes scripts to build installable font
files. Although the documentation
says several of the individual scripts in AFDKO are open source, the
download as a whole is not; the license
agreement forbids reverse-engineering. The auxiliary files themselves
are not in a standard, documented format that other tools can utilize.
However, that does not mean the auxiliary files are of no value. Some
of their information could be extracted with minimal fuss and the
judicious application of scripting. Many of the same features can
also be extracted from the font files themselves in an open source
editor like FontForge. Vernon Adams, developer of KDE's Oxygen font,
commented
on the blog post that he was interested in extracting the
horizontal spacing information from Source Sans Pro and adapting it to
Oxygen.
In the purely-open-source font development workflow, adding OpenType
features to a font is typically done in FontForge — although it is far
from pleasant. FontForge hides the necessary options and tools
remarkably well, and effectively dictates that building the final font
files be done manually. Better command-line tools like those in AFDKO
could help automate the procedure. Intriguingly enough, several
commenters in the blog post discussion raised questions about AFDKO,
and Hunt replied
with interest asking what would be necessary to make the release
buildable on Linux.
In reply, Hunt got advice not just on the build process, but on how to
set up Source Sans Pro as a "real" project and not just a Zip-dump —
including issue tracking, revision control, and a development mailing
list. He gave a hopeful-sounding response:
Thanks for bringing up these points. As this is our first open source
offering, these are all matters we will have to deal with going
forward. This is just the beginning of this journey for us, so please
be patient as we try to figure out things along the way. I will
personally look into the issues you bring up here and be working on a
plan on how to address these items where we can.
Bug reports and fixes are already beginning to queue up, too. Several
on the Open Font Library list noticed problems with the weight values
of the fonts (numeric metadata used to sort the various "light" to
"heavy" versions of the font). As John Haltiwanger put it, "And
(finally) we are legally allowed to fix a broken element in an Adobe
font!"
Fonts and project management
Adobe is not alone among open font projects that come up short on bug
tracking, revision control, and other development tools. Only a few
large font projects tackle these challenges, and they do so in decidedly
different ways. DejaVu, Liberation, SIL, and Ubuntu all employ
different methods for tracking issues and feature requests, managing
source code, merging patches, and making releases. Individuals
working on a handful of personal font projects are even less likely to
deploy such support utilities.
The lack of formal source code repositories and issue trackers
generally means that distributions undertake the work of packaging and
testing open fonts. Because Source Sans Pro relies on the non-free
Fontlab and AFDKO, one might think it has scant chances of working its
way into distribution packages, but Fedora's Ian Weller observed
that Fedora's guidelines do not require that a font be
buildable with open source software alone — they merely
recommend it. A Fedora review
request was opened on August 4. There is also a package
request for the font in Debian, although Debian's guidelines
dictate that a font with a non-free build path will be packaged for
contrib.
There are a few inconsistencies in the Zip files, such as which
feature files are present in which directories, and which include .SFA
versus .VFB source files. Those are problems that source code
management would help quash. Hunt also teased the future release
of a monospace version of the font, which would be of particular
interest to developers. Seeing such ongoing work in the open would
also be a nice touch, and would allow the community to contribute to
the process. However, one should not lose sight of Source Sans Pro's
importance even in Zip format: Adobe has released its first open font,
its team seems well aware of the issues involved (licensing and
tool support included), and is expressing interest in fitting the
project into the expected conventions and procedures of open source.
Comments (27 posted)
By Michael Kerrisk
August 8, 2012
Given this editor's recent history (3 years working there), an article
on the GENIVI Alliance was perhaps
inevitable, and perhaps it's better done sooner while the experience is
still fresh. However, GENIVI is more than just a matter of personal
interest and experience: the development of GENIVI has some interesting
lessons on the adoption of free and open source software, and the results
of the consortium's work are soon likely to be directly visible to many readers
of this article on a daily basis.
Goals and history
The name GENIVI is an acronym based on the name of the
Swiss city,
Geneva, and "IVI". Geneva holds no special significance
to the consortium beyond the fact that it hosted an industry meeting where
some early discussions about formation of the consortium took place; the
consortium itself is incorporated in the United States as a
501(c)(6)
nonprofit organization.
The first question of course is: what is GENIVI? The brief answer is
that it is a consortium of companies whose goal is to define a standardized
common software platform for developing in-vehicle infotainment (IVI)
systems and to nurture a development ecosystem around that platform. IVI
systems, known in the trade as head units, are the computer systems
commonly found in high-end cars and commercial vehicles—and
increasingly in mid-range cars and other vehicles—that provide a
range of entertainment and other functions.
Typical IVI functions include control of the media system (e.g., music
player, radio, rear-seat video), navigation assistance and location-based
services, and display from the rear-view camera on vehicles that provide
one. Input to a modern IVI system is via physical wheel devices and buttons
or a touch-screen interface, and, commonly, voice recognition. Many modern
IVI systems provide integration with consumer-electronics devices via
technologies such as Bluetooth and USB. The most interesting such devices
are of course smart phones, where integration with the IVI system allows
functionality such as playback of media hosted on the phone and hands-free,
voice-activated calls conducted via the head-unit audio system. This type
of integration also allows
conveniences such as automatically turning the volume of the radio down
when an incoming caller rings the phone.
The formation of the consortium was announced
at the start of 2009, although there is some prehistory to its foundation
that we'll briefly return to in a moment. The founding membership consisted
of 8 companies that typify several categories of what is by now a much
larger membership: automotive manufacturers (BMW Group, PSA Peugeot
Citroën, General Motors), tier 1 automotive suppliers (Delphi,
Magneti-Marelli, Visteon), Silicon vendors (Intel), and operating system
vendors (Wind River Systems, then an independent company, now a subsidiary
of Intel). During the subsequent three years, membership in each of the
aforementioned categories has swelled (notably, a number of ARM Silicon
vendors now balance out the heavyweight Intel among the Silicon
vendors). In addition, ISVs (independent software vendors), middleware
vendors, and software services companies with an interest in the automotive
sector have also joined the consortium, with the result that the GENIVI membership has
now grown to over 150 companies spread across Europe, America, and South
and East Asia.
Above, I said GENIVI's goal is to define a standardized common software
platform. That platform is not a complete IVI system. Rather, it is
a packaging of operating system and middleware components that implement a
range of non-differentiating functionalities that all IVI
systems require. (Bluetooth connectivity is an example of what automotive
manufacturers might consider non-differentiating functionality:
manufacturers want a working implementation, but don't market their IVI
systems to customers based on the Bluetooth implementation.)
In effect, one of GENIVI's goals is to decrease the cost of developing the
base system, so that developer resources can be devoted
to innovating at higher levels in the software stack, such as the
human-machine interface.
Linux and open source software were chosen as for the GENIVI
software platform during an evaluation project that predated the
foundation of the consortium.
That project (conducted by BMW, Magneti Marelli, Intel, and Wind River)
was motivated by the desire to balance two opposing
requirements. On one side stand ever-increasing demands on the development
and scope of IVI systems: to drivers, an IVI system starts to look more and
more like other consumer electronics devices, and drivers expect to see
similar levels of functionality and rapid development
cycles. Furthermore, there is a market pressure to see IVI systems in all
vehicle categories, rather than just the high end. On the other side, the
costs of IVI system development have grown astronomical—a figure of
$100 million to bring a solution from the drawing board to dashboard is
not unheard of, and such costs are becoming intolerable for all but the
largest automotive manufacturers.
In the evaluation phase, a number of platform alternatives were
considered, including proprietary systems such as Windows CE and QNX. However, it quickly became
clear that a platform based on Linux
and free software had the most to offer, based on factors such as the economies
available from reuse of software components and, importantly, the
realization that free software would allow the greatest degree of control
of the content and development of the platform. On that basis, the
evaluation project embarked (successfully) on a proof-of-concept
implementation of a prototype head-unit system based on Linux and free
software components.
GENIVI outputs
In addition to code projects worked on by members,
the consortium produces two primary outputs: a
compliance specification and a baseline software release.
The goal of the compliance specification is to ensure that compliant
GENIVI products ease integration of third-party software components,
rather than guaranteeing full API or ABI compatibility across
implementations. (In other words, GENIVI doesn't set out to be a
standardization body.) Compliance is currently based on
self-certification, but in time the plan is move to a more test-driven form
of certification. The compliance specification is
currently a members-only document.
The GENIVI baseline software release is essentially an internal
proof-of-concept for the compliance specification. It is a packaging of the
components required by a specific release of the compliance specification
on top of a Linux distribution. The baseline isn't directly available
outside the GENIVI membership, but is indirectly available via a number of
GENIVI respins created by incorporating the baseline component set into an
upstream distribution. These respins are created by GENIVI members and
available to anyone for download. GENIVI respins are currently created for
Ubuntu, Tizen, and Yocto.
What is the problem that GENIVI is trying to solve?
Technically speaking, implementing partial or complete IVI systems on
Linux isn't fundamentally different or more difficult than using the
platforms traditionally employed in the automotive industry. The pre-GENIVI
proof-of-concept work, the recent Cadillac
CUE system, and a range of demonstrator systems that appear at the
twice-yearly GENIVI member meetings provide ample evidence of that fact.
This raises the questions: why don't we already have (more) Linux-based IVI
systems on the road and why is an alliance like GENIVI even necessary?
To answer those questions requires understanding that GENIVI's
objective is not to solve a software technical problem, but rather
to solve a software business problem. Escalating software costs mean
that automotive manufacturers need to escape their traditional cycle of
constantly reimplementing individually developed, tailor-made solutions for
their IVI systems. The name of the game is to share development
costs by collaborating on the development of a common, reusable
software platform. The challenge then becomes: how does a diverse group of
companies transform their traditional business and software development
practices, stepping toward a new model to collaboratively define a common
platform and bring it to reality? In practice that has proved to be quite
a challenge.
The rocky road from prototype to product
To see why the path forward for GENIVI has been difficult requires some
understanding of the traditional software development model in the
automotive industry.
The traditional approach to IVI software development is rather
waterfall in style: the automotive manufacturer develops a set of
requirements and then, armed with a large checkbook,
enters into a contract with a tier 1 supplier who
does all of the software development to fulfill those requirements
(in fact,
the tier 1 supplier is often tasked with delivering the whole package of
IVI hardware and software). Once development is completed,
the manufacturer black-box tests the resulting software, and then ships it
in vehicle head units. (In this traditional approach,
it's worth noting that the manufacturer typically has few software
engineers, and does little software development.)
Given their historical role as holders of the checkbooks, it's perhaps
unsurprising that automotive manufacturers at first tried to remake
GENIVI in the mold that was familiar to them. Thus, in its initial
incarnation, although GENIVI's stated goal was to create a (largely) open
source platform, the proposed development process was rather waterfall
style, driven from the top down by the automotive manufacturers. The
proposed process consisted of traditional phases: gathering of
requirements, discovering an architecture, mapping the architecture to
software components, and then selecting (existing) open source software
components, and implementing new components to fill the gaps.
Waterfall-style development is prone to be complex and time consuming; what
made it even worse in GENIVI's case was trying to the scale the development
process to handle multiple participating companies.
For many readers, it is probably no surprise that the results of trying
to employ such a model to select and create open source software were not
as successful as hoped: internal teams got bogged down in trying to define
the process, and the alliance found it too unwieldy to implement in
practice. Further complicating the problem was the fact that information
was not open equally to all members of the alliance (there were
restrictions on access to information such as draft specifications and
other in-progress work according to the paid-for level of membership). The
consequence of that differential access to information was to further
impede participation in the work of the consortium.
What happened in response to the early low participation levels is
something of a textbook lesson for any company, or, more particularly, any
industry group trying to move to open source. Recognizing the problem, the
consortium's Board of Directors implemented some simple but radical steps:
membership-based restrictions to information inside the consortium were
abolished and the top-down waterfall model described above was replaced by
requirements gathering and implementation driven from the bottom, via
domain-specific "Expert Groups" that any interested member company was free
to participate in. The results of these changes became apparent quite
rapidly: the level of mailing-list traffic, wiki activity, scheduled
face-to-face meetings, and code contribution all increased
dramatically.
Engaging with the open source community
Having read this far, the question you may be left wondering is: is
GENIVI open?
From a process perspective, the answer is no. Access to various
internal resources such as the wiki, issue tracker, and mailing lists is
limited to the (paying) membership. Similarly, attendance at face-to-face
meetings is limited to the membership. However, the boundary between
members and nonmembers is already somewhat permeable. For example, a
number of open source developers with relevant expertise have been invited
to GENIVI meetings and provided valuable input—among them Kay Sievers
and Lennart Poettering (systemd), Marcel Holtmann (BlueZ, ConnMan, oFono),
Samuel Ortiz (ConnMan), and Kristian Hoegsberg (Wayland). In time, it can
be expected that the boundary between members and nonmembers may become
even more permeable; it's an ongoing process.
From a code perspective, GENIVI is not fully open source, but it's
getting steadily closer. As noted above, the GENIVI baseline respins are
publicly available, but the repositories of GENIVI-developed code are not
(even though the code in those repositories is all under OSI-approved
licenses). However, that situation is likely to change quite soon, as
moves are afoot to open GENIVI work more widely to the outside world (so
that individual GENIVI code projects have open code repositories, bug
trackers, and mailing lists). At that point, it's likely that activity on
GENIVI will notch up yet further, as outside developers start to take a
closer interest in pieces of the code. (It should be noted GENIVI's goal
is, as far as possible, to reuse open source software components; new
components are developed by GENIVI members only in cases where no suitable
free software component can be found. Thus, there are to date relatively
few GENIVI code projects, for example, an automotive specific audio manager
and a graphics layer management system; the vast majority of the components
in the GENIVI respins are direct from the open source ecosystem.)
Looking in the other direction, GENIVI is increasingly participating in
upstream projects, with members getting involved via code or conversations
in a number of open source projects, such as systemd and ConnMan. In recent
times, GENIVI has even been getting involved with kernel development,
sponsoring development of kernel patches to improve D-Bus performance. (As
noted in an earlier LWN article, the
attempt to upstream this work has not so far proved successful. However,
D-Bus is viewed as a key component of GENIVI, and it's likely that further
work will be done to come up with a kernel solution to improving D-Bus
performance that may be acceptable to the maintainer of the Linux
networking stack.)
Challenges
There are a number of ongoing challenges for GENIVI, and one or two
that remain unresolved. Some of the challenges can be easily guessed at, or
can be deduced with a little reflection. For example, as with most open
source projects, more contributors would always speed up development.
The process of adapting from closed software development in competition
with peers to a model of collaboratively working and sharing ideas (so far,
mainly within the membership) is ongoing. For companies that have not
previously done so (which includes much of the GENIVI membership),
contributing code under open source licenses involves educating both
developers and company lawyers. But considering the heavily proprietary
origins of automotive software, the progress has already been considerable.
A notable challenge for automotive manufacturers is that, by virtue of
being distributors of open source software in their head units, they now
need to ensure their engineers and lawyers are well educated about free
software licenses. Furthermore, their code management processes need to be
adapted to satisfy the obligations of those licenses, in particular, of
course, the source code redistribution requirements of the GPL. By and
large, the manufacturers seem to understand the challenge and are rising to
it.
The GNU GPLv3
remains a so-far unresolved challenge for GENIVI. Already, a small but
significant percentage of free software projects use this license, and over
time more can be expected to do so. However, automotive manufacturers feel
that they can't use software under this license in IVI systems. The
problem hinges on the so-called anti-Tivoization clause of the
GPLv3. In essence, this clause says that if GPLv3-licensed object code is
placed on a computer system, then, either the system must prevent updates
to that code by all users (i.e., no one, including the manufacturer,
can perform updates) or, if the system does allow updates to the
GPLv3-licensed software (e.g., so that the manufacturer can make updates),
then the software recipient (i.e., the car driver) must likewise be
permitted to update the software. The automotive manufacturers' position
is that they need to be able to update the software in an IVI system, but
they can't let the driver do so.
The issues for the manufacturers are driver safety, and manufacturer
liability and reputation. Even if head-unit systems where fully isolated
from the in-vehicle networks that control safety-critical functions such as
the braking system (and in most automotive architectures they are not fully
isolated), there are features of IVI systems that can be considered
safety-impacting. It's easy to see that accidents could result if the
navigation system directs the driver in the wrong direction up a one-way
street or the picture from the rear-vision camera is delayed by 2
seconds. Consequently, the manufacturers' stance is that the only software
that they can permit on the head unit is software that they've tested.
Since the GPLv3 would in effect require manufacturers to allow
drivers to perform software updates on the head unit, GPLv3-licensed
software is currently considered a no-go area. (An oft-proposed resolution
to the manufacturers' conundrum is the "solution" that the manufacturer
should simply void the warranty if the driver wants to make software
updates to the head unit. However, that's not a palatable option: such
disclaimers may or may not hold up in court, and they don't protect
reputations in the face of newspaper headlines along the lines of "4 killed
following navigation failure in well-known manufacturer's car".)
The future
With respect to IVI systems, the future for GENIVI in particular, and
Linux in general, looks bright. A number of manufacturers plan to
have GENIVI-based head units in production within the next two years. In
addition, at least one other Linux-based product (the Cadillac CUE) is
already in production, and other Linux-based systems are rumored to be
under development. Overall, a substantial body of automotive interest
seems to be coalescing around Linux, so it's perhaps no surprise that the
Linux Foundation is organizing the second Automotive
Linux Summit next month in England. It seems likely that in a few
years, we'll be living in a world where Linux in automotive
IVI systems is as common as it is in today's consumer electronic devices.
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