List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf]

Re:List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] by sjwright on Thursday October 24, 2013 @04:23AM (#6603975)

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, and probably not worthy of promotion on Hacker News. Consider the counterfactual: if Merc hadn't used these open source libraries, they would have had to roll their own implementations of PNG, ZIP, an XML parser... now that would be a story!

Similar hilariously long lists can be found on many web-connected devices, from BMWs to iPhones.

(Pages 3 to 6 are the interesting ones though -- it shows that a majority of these libraries/codebases apply to the brand new S-Class. And the most noteworthy inclusion is AOSP, i.e. Android.)

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Re:List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] by adrianb on Thursday October 24, 2013 @05:12AM (#6604139)

Entertainment and navigation systems in cars use Android lately. They normally use the base operating system and APIs while the UI is always heavily customized, so you might not recognize it, but it's of course very convenient instead of developing a full OS for your cars.

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Re:List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] by Xylakant on Thursday October 24, 2013 @04:28AM (#6603982)

I'm not surprised they use OS. Some of the libraries come as a surprise to me:

* gcc * libpcap * strace * netcat

I also found it slightly amusing that liboil is used in a car (and is completely unrelated to "oil")

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Re:List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] by sjwright on Thursday October 24, 2013 @04:39AM (#6604003)

My guess is it's a lot easier to add a bunch of licenses into the documentation than it is to exclude diagnostic tools from production builds.

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Re:List of Open Source Licences in Mercedes Cars [pdf] by tobithiel on Thursday October 24, 2013 @05:22AM (#6604184)

These are mostly used for diagnosing/debugging the newer head units. They rely on BT and standard networking. GCC is pretty standard for any embedded device, I would say.

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