Linux Soon to be in your Car

From the ‘I got Linux in my Bimmer‘ files:

Thanks to a new joint effort between Intel and Wind River, you may soon be running Linux in your car.

The effort will run under the auspices of the Intel led Moblin.org effort   and will deal specifically with the in-vehicle infotainment marketplace. The idea is to create a Linux based Open Infotainment Platform that will run on Intel’s Atom processor. According to a release issued by Wind River, BMW, Bosch and Delphi are among the companies that are already supporting the effort.

The actual open source code specification is not yet on the Moblin site though Wind River expects to make it available by August of 2008.

In my opinion, this is clearly another victory for embedded Linux which is an incredibly important area for the Open Source operating system. Linux is making inroads in the embedded mobile space thanks in large part to the leadership of Motorola and others. In the consumer space MontaVista Linux has done well thanks to numerous partnership including a very strategic one with Texas Instruments.

The involvement of Wind River is also very noteworthy. After all it wasn’t all that long ago that Wind River was the ‘competition’ for embedded Linux, with the Wind River VxWorks embedded OS (and certainly VxWorks still does compete in many instances). But Wind River is now clearly active and aggressive with its Linux initiatives and that’s a great thing for the embedded market.