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The automotive industry is in the middle of one of the biggest architectural shifts in its history. Vehicles are becoming software platforms, hardware is becoming abstracted, and the companies that have spent decades competing fiercely are now sitting around the same table asking a different question: where can we collaborate, and where do we still compete?
In May’s Women Automotive Network virtual event, Building the Software-Defined Vehicle: The Role of Open Source and Global Collaboration, senior professionals joined from across the global automotive ecosystem to explore how open source is reshaping the way the industry builds, ships, and certifies automotive software.
Facilitated by Stephanie May, the session featured Sara Gallian, Senior Manager, SDV and Automotive Programs at the Eclipse Foundation Europe GmbH. Sara leads the Software Defined Vehicle Working Group and brought a clear, grounded view of where the industry actually is in its open source journey, what the Eclipse Foundation is building, and what it really takes for an organisation to move from observer to contributor to leader.
Live polls opened the session and revealed a familiar pattern. Some attendees were already familiar with the Eclipse Foundation and active in open source communities. Others were hearing the term Software Defined Vehicle for the first time. The maturity curve is real, and the gap between the two ends of it is widening fast.
What stood out, as in every WAN session, was the openness to learn. Sara framed it directly: open source already powers cloud, AI, semiconductor, and cybersecurity, with around 81% of companies consuming open source products. Automotive has been slower to follow, but that is changing fast.
For decades, vehicles have been built hardware first. The car was the product, and software served the hardware. That model is now under serious pressure from four directions at once: infotainment and user experience, electrification, autonomous driving, and the rising expectation that a vehicle should improve continuously across its life, not stay frozen at the moment of purchase.
Sara was clear about what this means in practice. Software complexity and variant handling are exploding. Computing capability is constantly constrained. And the industry is struggling to attract skilled developers, who typically prefer to work in cloud or with hyperscalers rather than in automotive.
The shift is from hardware-defined to software-defined. From single-vendor builds to ecosystems. From owning every line of code to choosing carefully where to compete and where to collaborate.
One of the strongest moments of the session was Sara’s direct answer when asked whether open source is becoming a baseline necessity rather than a differentiator.
“Yes, it is a commodity. No one is making money any more on a middleware. Your customers do not care what communication protocol is in their car. They care about the functionality and the experience. So why spend money and time developing everything from scratch?”
This is a meaningful shift in how senior automotive leaders should be thinking about software strategy. The competitive value sits at the experience layer. The foundational layer is increasingly something the industry builds together, openly, with shared cost and shared risk.
Sara outlined a clear and repeatable path for how organisations engage with open source over time. It is one of the most useful frameworks of the session because it removes the intimidation that often surrounds the topic.
The data point Sara shared made the size of the opportunity clear. 81% of companies consume open source. Around 80 to 90% of any modern application is built on it. Yet only 44% of organisations contribute upstream. There is a large gap between consumption and contribution, and that is where the competitive advantage now sits for forward-looking companies.
Not all open source is equal. Sara was direct about the difference between releasing code on a public repository and hosting it inside a foundation like Eclipse.
A solo or single vendor project can be high quality, but it lacks the things that make collaboration sustainable across competitors: vendor neutral governance, a predictable process, proper IP and licensing management, and a structure that prevents any single contributor from controlling the direction.
For automotive companies, where IP and compliance carry serious weight, this distinction is not a detail. It is the difference between a project that scales across the industry and one that stalls when commercial interests collide.
Established in 2022, the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle Working Group follows a code-first approach. It is not a talking shop. It is building, in the open, the foundational software stack and tooling for the next generation of vehicles.
The membership tells the story of how seriously the industry is taking this:
Together they are building a portfolio of interoperable building blocks across operating systems, orchestration, middleware, and developer tooling. Each block is a real open source project with its own team and roadmap, and the architecture is deliberately modular so that organisations can swap pieces in and out.
If there was one moment in the session that demonstrated how far the conversation has come, it was Sara’s update on Eclipse S-CORE. This is the first end-to-end middleware project, operating system through to applications, that is being designed to be certifiable against ISO 26262.
The headline numbers are significant:
The myth that safety-critical software cannot be built in the open is being actively disproved, with the support of the largest names in the industry.
One of the strongest threads through the session was the emphasis on community. The Eclipse Foundation hosts over 425 open source projects, more than 300 members, and represents over 50 countries. The SDV community itself runs meetups, hackathons, community days, and the annual Automotive Open Source Summit. Recent activity has spanned a meetup in India, presence at CES in the US at the start of the year, a meetup in the US scheduled for November, and Stuttgart for the WAN Europe Summit where Eclipse has hosted a workshop for three consecutive years.
For automotive professionals who often work inside large, slow-moving organisations, the ability to plug into a global community of developers and managers working on the same problems is a real career and capability advantage.
Sara closed the technical section with the wider strategic context. The European Union is investing heavily in digital sovereignty, and open source is one of the central instruments. It reduces dependency on a small number of global providers. It allows structural investment in shared infrastructure. It operationalises open standards. It accelerates innovation in emerging domains. And critically, it lowers the barrier to entry for SMEs and startups that could not otherwise compete with incumbents on raw infrastructure spend.
For European automotive companies, this is not a peripheral conversation. It is connected directly to industrial strategy.
If you attended live or are watching on demand, here are three practical actions to take the conversation forward inside your own organisation.
If you would like to explore the Eclipse SDV ecosystem in detail, hear Sara’s full breakdown of S-CORE, and revisit the framing on open source maturity, the complete session is available below.
The Eclipse Foundation provides its global community of individuals and organisations with a mature, scalable, and business-friendly environment for open source software collaboration and innovation.
The Foundation is home to the Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle, and over 425 open source projects, including runtimes, tools, and frameworks for cloud and edge applications, IoT, AI, automotive, systems engineering, distributed ledger technologies, open processor designs, and many others.
Eclipse Foundation | Powering Open Innovation
With a 50,000+ global community across 139 countries worldwide, and flagship summits in Europe, the US, Mexico and Japan, the Women Automotive Network (WAN) is a trusted global platform for organisations across the automotive and mobility ecosystem.
We partner with leading OEMs, Tier 1 and Tier 2 suppliers, and technology companies to support leadership development, employer brand visibility, and meaningful engagement with senior industry talent.
For all enquiries, get in touch here.
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