BMW is looking pioneer a move away from proprietary systems used for in-car entertainment systems, allowing developers to build plug and play applications especially for their cars. This could be extremely good news for the open source community and another ‘notch in the bed post’ in the fight against closed source systems.

When a manufacturer or software provider uses closed source systems those systems are then not open to modification and customisation by it’s user. A user is essentially restricted by what that manufacturer or provider allows you to do, which is often not a lot. Closed source systems don’t allow interaction with other company’s products and whilst this may be preferable to that company, as it ties the user to their products it doesn’t really benefit the consumer leaving them frustrated and annoyed.

Apple’s iPod is a great example of this problem. Originally Apple didn’t allow interaction between their product and 3rd party products. This meant that a Linux user couldn’t use an iPod as they had no method of song management because iTunes is not compatible with Linux Operating Systems. Similarly if you had an iPod dock to play your music out loud, you couldn’t use that dock to play music from a 3rd party MP3 player. This has since changed as many developers and hardware providers have found ways of ‘hacking’ into the iPod and forcing it to be compatible with their systems.

“We were convinced we had to develop an open platform that would allow for open software since the speed in the infotainment and entertainment industry requires us to be on a much faster track,”

said Gunter Reichart, BMW vice president of driver assistance, body electronics and electrical networks.

“We invite other OEMs to join with us, to exchange with us. We are open to exchange with others.”

A great example of the power of Open Source systems that most of us can relate to has to be the Mozilla Firefox Internet Browser software. Thousands of add ons have been developed by a thriving community of developers to enhance the functionality of the browser and talking from personal experience, I simply cannot use other web browsers as they just don’t provide what I need.

Well done BMW, lets hope you can convince the other manufaturers to follow your example.