Can Airware be the operating system to connect the world's drones?

There is no reason why it would be any more difficult to certify then Airware. The 3DR stuff is already more then capable todo the task and 3DR sells in the commercial space. Source: I've personally done multiple long range (many miles) autonomous missions and landed within 3ft of the target landing zone, I have hundreds of hours of flight time with many different platforms (Naze32, APM, Pixhawk, DJI).

Maybe it will be difficult to fully certify in the way you are thinking but the definition of "Commercial" is certainly going to be changing as rules for drones under 55lbs are finalized in the US as they already have been elsewhere. I think the space Airware will be able to compete successfully in with their current strategy will shrink as those rules get formalized and "hobbyist" platforms are used to do more and more real work. (Not that I don't wish them the best of luck - there are great folks over at Airware.)

it's just a matter of time before the open source platforms add in the features required for FAA etc approvals.

All the other components (aside from flight controllers and chassis) are already OEM hobby items anyway, just photographed and put into a flashy brochure. It's not a big step to FAA approvals, despite the fanfare this seems to attract.

What do you mean by "hobbyist"? 3DR itself has commercial operations as well, not to mention the countless users of the components in various industries.

Certification will come from companies using the off-the-shelf components. Most likely privately.

Are you implying that 3DR drones use a different software?

It is definitely PR. Airware has invested a lot more into doing its own hardware, its own possibly certifiable low level code than doing exciting things (sense & avoid etc). Heck, no amount of money will let you write a single line of code on their OS for drones currently.

But is the PR going to work ? It seems easy enough to deter the "serious guys" doing some "serious commercial inspection" from using 3dr. The same way people use cisco equipment on their network because they're told that's what you do if you want peace of mind.

It's a good point that we've seen this before. I'm under the impression that many early computer standards were essentially de facto standards caused by everyone trying to be compatible with a market leader. e.g. "Unix-like" or "IBM PC compatible". That's probably not the only way, though.

I guess the real question is "how are successful standards created?"

The point is not about Rpi, it was just an example. The powerful thing is that it's open source, very active project (check out https://github.com/diydrones/ardupilot), and runs (among other things) on standard Linux distributions. 3DR has received over $40m of funding so far, it is not in any way just a hobbyist platform and is aggressively going after industry verticals like farming.

They manufacture and sell their own drones but there is also a growing number of other manufacturers building drones using ardupilot.

That's not to say that Airware won't have customers, since drones in general are a fast growing sector and there's plenty of room for different businesses. But I doubt it will be the de facto operating system for drones

I'd still expect that we'll see something like a real time OS microkernel written in hardened C or Ada/Spark or kin with a standard suite of drivers to control sensors, motors, etc.

Most of those kind of things get written as open source projects, and then compiled in to specific bundles by middle men who get certified by insurance companies to reliably choose and compile such bundles.

Big companies (eg, Boeing) will naturally still just use the open source microkernel tied together with a few in house drivers, since they have the capacity to deal with software certification themselves.

Really, I wish hobbyist drones would start having more functional co-processors, because I want one where the flight computer and the user land computer... aren't the same core.