What\u2019s cooking for Eclipse Kuksa? We recently caught up with four members of the project team, Erik Jaegervall, Sven Erik Jeroschewski, Lukas Mittag, and Sebastian Schildt, to find out what the automotive project is currently working on.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a common myth in the software industry that research projects stifle innovative ideas. This misconception suggests that these projects rarely prove useful, let alone deliver business value, outside the cosy cocoons of academia and well-funded corporate labs. It\u2019s easily overlooked that, for example, the PageRank algorithm, which became the foundation of the leading global search engine and the cornerstone of Google\u2019s business, was developed at Stanford University by the Google founders themselves. And let\u2019s not forget that Dartmouth College is recognised as the birthplace of modern artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eclipse Kuksa<\/a>, an open source automotive project, might become another shining example of how a former research project can grow into a thriving, successful technology. Initiated in 2016 as part of the APPSTACLE<\/a> research project \u2013 where universities and research institutions work alongside software and telecommunications companies \u2013 Eclipse Kuksa is developing into a force to be reckoned with, both in the automotive industry and in the open source realm. It\u2019s thanks to the hard work and persistence of the people behind the project \u2013 Johannes Kristan, Sven Erik Jeroschewski, Sebastian Schildt, Erik Jaegervall, Andre Weber, and Lukas Mittag, to name only a few<\/a> \u2013 that Eclipse Kuksa is currently reaching a new level of maturity and gaining traction in other open source communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eclipse Kuksa is part of a rapidly expanding ecosystem that promotes the advancement of open source components for the automotive industry: the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle (SDV)<\/a> Working Group. In fact, it was one of the Working Group\u2019s first projects. With great foresight, the APPSTACLE team around Bosch, Netas, FH Dortmund, and others decided to contribute the project to an open source organisation right from the outset. They agreed that, \u201cinstead of only producing paper that later gets burned or is put into some drawers, whenever we build prototypes or proofs of concept, this should be contributed to an open source project under the Eclipse Foundation,\u201d as Sebastian Schildt explained in an EclipseCon talk<\/a> in 2018. Making the existing code available via an open source foundation was also recognised by fellow project team members as the best approach to help the project gain wider adoption: \u201cWe had three years of public funds to work on the APPSTACLE project and at the end of it, the results had to be able to live on their own,\u201d stated Johann Kristan, one of the original project members, in 2020<\/a>. \u201cOtherwise, after those three years, the research project would be over, the work would be abandoned, and although the individual participants could use their own results, no one would be using the collective results of the research.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although Eclipse Kuksa didn\u2019t influence the creation of Eclipse SDV directly, as Sven Erik Jeroschewski sees it, the automotive community had arrived at a \u201ccrystallisation point\u201d at which collaboration on open source automotive software had become indispensable, with Eclipse Kuksa serving as a \u201clighthouse\u201d project in this context. To the question of what motivated Bosch to contribute this project to an open source foundation, given the required investment of resources, Jeroschweski answered: “We were already engaged in open source projects relating to the Internet of Things, and this was an opportunity to further our progress in the automotive domain. In addition, the creation of the research project has already demonstrated that the challenge of connecting vehicle applications in an interoperable way cannot be solved by a single player. Creating such fundamental APIs and data models requires the collaboration and perspective of multiple partners. As a consequence, it was seen as a natural step to continue the development under an OSS license to ensure the success of the overall ecosystem. Contributing to such a shared platform allows the involved parties to continue their individual business activities on top of it.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sebastian Schildt added: “As automotive was doing its first steps to more open collaborative work, the COVESA Vehicle Signal Specification<\/a> gained more traction, by describing and unifying the semantics of vehicle data. The Eclipse Kuksa team identified having such a standardised data model as a strategically interesting topic. Since specifications without implementations are, in most cases, anything but relevant, the decision was to drive the development of VSS as a standard by means of an implementation. Thus, the Kuksa project was further refined and driven to make the VSS easy and efficient to integrate and use in a vehicle.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nBeyond the Ivory Tower<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Pioneering Eclipse SDV<\/h3>\n\n\n\n