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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Well, they could dedicate a team to it if they were serious about it and work with open source advocates to make it all work.

I'd rather have a tarball with hard to parse code and weird tooling than nothing at all. But - as I said - I have no illusions about this and see it as a marketing effort.

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In my experience it's fairly common even for the manufacturer to not have full access to the code, let alone permission to open source it. I don't think it makes it merely a "marketing effort" if they avoid that.

Yes, I'm aware of that. Which is why my assumption that this would be a red herring was born out. As long as Freescale and Bosch are in control I don't see any of this changing.

I did some work on a toolchain used in automotive (and other industries) to proof^W prove certain software properties related to safety. This is already a massive effort, expensive to build & maintain - but after all a small cog in the whole machine. (Using Rust over subset-of-C would deprecate maybe half of that work; at most I'd guess). The hypothetical team would take a decade or two to replicate just that cog.

Yes, having the whole machinery available as FOSS would be awesome and I'd like to live & work in a world in which this is the norm (Hello, Star Trek?). But all this requires very talented people, many of whom studied and racked up student debt, want something to eat and a place to stay. We first need another paradigm shift to make this kind niche open work sustainable.

Oh, and if you ever find yourself in a car with critical components not checked with that kind of toolchain: I strongly recommended getting out of there asap ;-) For all the excellent people building that software, there will always be some who'd be better writing mobile apps instead (or anything else that cannot kill people).

(btw: You asked me about the setpoints of the 12k 3P Deye inverters a while ago: Seems to work nice for me with my basic "just the inverter + PV + battery" setup. Though some people report trouble when using AC coupling with another inverter; in that case the Deye seems to swing more around the setpoint).

The main thing I think manufacturers would try to avoid is to be embarrassed by the kind of shenanigans that helped VW to pass emissions inspections when in fact they shouldn't have. And that's proof enough to me that manufacturers don't give a rats ass about safety or the environment if it means more money for them.

I realize how complex those toolchains are (and how many parties would have to sign off on a release) but what amazes me more is that we are willing to trust these manufacturers on their say-so. Because chances are their interests and our interests are not aligned, as the diesel scandal has clearly proven. And I would not be at all surprised if there were more such scandals but we just haven't uncovered them.

Given what the Asahilinux people and some other very talented individuals have done in the FOSS movement, combined with the fact that half the world is powered by open source including for many mission critical and safety critical applications I'm pretty sure we could handle vehicles as well.

Nice to see your setup works well!

Honestly just documenting the APIs the different components use to talk to one another would be incredibly helpful. There are so many things that could be done in the pursuit of openness that absolutely won't be.

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