The News
At CES 2026, the Eclipse Foundation and Germany’s automotive association, the VDA, announced a major expansion of their automotive open source Memorandum of Understanding (MoU), growing from 11 companies to 32 global participants. This expanded agreement brings together automakers, suppliers, software vendors, and chip companies to collaborate on shared, open source software building blocks for software-defined vehicles under the Eclipse SDV Working Group.
Analysis
Why Automotive Software Is at a Breaking Point
From driver assistance and infotainment to battery management and over-the-air updates, software now drives differentiation and customer experience. But most automotive software is still developed in silos, leading to duplicated effort, slow updates, and growing maintenance costs.
Our research consistently shows that as software becomes core to the product, development teams struggle with complexity, long release cycles, and integration issues across suppliers. In automotive, those challenges are magnified by safety requirements, long vehicle lifecycles, and regulatory pressure.
What This MoU Expansion Changes for the Market
By growing this MoU to 32 companies, the industry is signaling alignment around shared software foundations rather than everyone reinventing the same components. The goal is not to standardize innovation, but to standardize the plumbing, or the basic software layers that every vehicle needs but that don’t directly differentiate one brand from another.
According to the Eclipse Foundation, participants expect this approach could reduce development and maintenance effort for non-differentiating software by up to 40%, while improving interoperability across vehicle platforms and suppliers. For the broader application development market, this mirrors trends already seen in cloud-native and enterprise software, where open source has become the default way to build shared infrastructure.
What Changes for Developers Going Forward
With shared, open source foundations, developers may be able to focus more on building features that directly impact drivers and fleet operators (e.g., user experience, energy efficiency, and intelligent automation) rather than rewriting the same low-level services.
The collaboration centers on Eclipse S-CORE, a shared, automotive-grade software stack that brings multiple projects together into a common reference platform. Its first public release in late 2025 showed early progress, with a full release planned in 2026 to support vehicle programs expected to launch by 2030. While outcomes will vary by organization, this model could help teams reduce integration risk and plan longer-term software roadmaps with more confidence.
Looking Ahead
The automotive industry is moving toward a future where software platforms matter as much as physical engineering. Open, collaborative development models like this MoU suggest the industry is learning from cloud and enterprise software, where shared foundations have proven essential for scaling innovation.
If this effort continues to gain traction, it could reshape how automotive software is built, certified, and maintained, shifting more effort toward innovation and less toward reinvention. For developers, the long-term impact may be simpler architectures, clearer interfaces between teams and suppliers, and a more sustainable way to build the next generation of software-defined mobility.
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