Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), described as a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for connected car technologies, has announced that Volkswagen has joined it and the Linux Foundation, a non-profit organisation 'enabling mass innovation through open source'.

AGL is an open source project at the Linux Foundation that says it is changing the way automotive manufacturers build software. More than 130 members are working together to develop a common platform that can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications. Adopting an open platform across the industry enables automakers and suppliers to share and reuse the same code base, which reduces development costs, decreases time-to-market for new products and reduces fragmentation across the industry.

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"The automotive industry is undergoing a digital transformation, and automakers and their suppliers are increasingly adopting open source solutions, like the AGL platform, to drive rapid innovation and enable them to bring products to market faster," said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation. "We are very excited to welcome Volkswagen to the AGL community, and we look forward to leveraging the technological expertise of their developers and engineers as we continue to enhance the AGL platform and develop new functionalities."

In 2008, Volkswagen contributed the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus networking subsystem to the Linux Kernel 2.6.25, which paved the way for a standardized socket API for developers and a common CAN network driver model for SoCs and PC-style CAN hardware. Within this contribution process, Volkswagen and non-automotive CAN users learned a lot from each other's use-cases so that the Linux CAN support is now widely used in industrial, automotive and academic setups (e.g. CERN).

"The Open Source approach provides excellent software solutions that are suitable to enable a long-term support of software over the vehicle life cycle," says Oliver Hartkopp, Open Source specialist at Volkswagen. "To ensure robust and secure solutions for our customers we want to be in close connection with the community to be able to directly interact with developers and maintainers."

Volkswagen is joining AGL to become a member of the development community for the common automotive Linux platform.

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Developed through a joint effort by dozens of member companies, the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) platform is an open source software platform for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications. It provides 70% of the starting point for a production project and includes an operating system, middleware and application framework. Automakers and suppliers can customise the platform with features, services and branding to meet their unique product and customer needs.