Jon Udell writes about Engines…

Jon Udell writes about Engines, steering wheels, and open source, using the automobile industry as a point of comparison to Open Source projects.

I gave a talk at a conference focussed on how cellular technology and cars come together in the future and posed the other side of this: how different would the automobile be if the industry opened up parts of the car as a platform for others to innovate on? What if there were open standards for networking in the car for the car telematics and the infotainment system? What if the processors in the car had open software where anyone could see the code and produce enhancements, etc?

Moveover what effect would these have on safety, gas mileage, reliability, new features, etc? I bet my iPod would integrate well with my car by now, but how about more important matters?