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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

So how ‘open’-source is that car now? This actually might make Nissan more attractive to some people.

Not very. The car's core logic doesn't seem to have been affected – which is understandable; I wouldn't trust your average non-specialist to write that kind of software, and this code all looks like it's been written by generalists – if I'm guessing the kinds of project right from their acronym, anyway.

If you read any write up on reverse engineering cars ECUs you will pray that your car get hacked and opensourced asap.

I mean, it will be better and safer coded by amateurs, but it might not pass emissions anymore ;)

A car ECU programmed by amateurs will not be better or safer than the one flashed by the OEM.

I dunno about that. I readily acknowledge that cars are a different bucket of fish, but the benefits of open-sourced firmware have been well-established in areas like routers.

It's also (hopefully) not a binary choice between OEM firmware and a clean-room from-scratch implementation. If it was I might agree, but the ideal scenario is that the OEM releases the firmware, then community members (okay, whatever, generalists and amateurs) get to fix bugs/do long-term support when the business has moved on. Complimentary rather than adversarial. For instance, even a generalist could throw some static analysis at some code and come up with a bunch of trivial (but useful!) memory correctness fixes or something like that.

The problem is that this is not the way the OEMs write the software. They are typically generated from some ecu/car/network system description using a code generator. So you get out this giant blob of optimized code which is essentially impossible to maintain, not to mention literally impossible to push to the upstream. On top of that, there are 10-30 ECU's in modern cars (often of 3-4 different SKUs), all with similar, but distinct code blobs. You would need a complete description of the cars network topology, the entire toolchain used to build the software and deploy it, the extremely expensive debug HW to debug it, and so on. The open source community does not develop software the same way OEMs develop software

Interesting, thanks for clarifying. Those do seem like big challenges.

> ECU programmed by amateurs will not be better or safer than the one flashed by the OEM

did you take on my suggestion to ready any reverse engineer post?

I have read some before, they are quite fun. But I also work on the actual OEM software itself =)

From my dealings with Nissan quite a bit of their code is written by third parties. And those third parties have locked in the car manufactures to the point where they share hexadecimal logs that only the third party can read.

That's not for Nissan only, it is quite standard for an automotive company to get software components from tens of partners.

@geohot

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