Re: Eggs
Indeed. The idea of one software system controlling the instrument binacle and the Internet connected infortainment system is, well, probably a little risky. You can smell the news articles about remote binnacle hacks coming from years away...
ARS Technica recently had an indepth review of various different systems used in cars today. Turns out that their most favourite ones were all based on QNX; seems that a proper real time OS is a very good idea in these things. A proper RTOS with decent context switch times means you can use cheaper hardware without compromising on response times. Trivial things like boot time matter. Get in your car, turn on, you want the radio working right then, you don't want some stupid Linux boot log scrolling past for 30 seconds...
Risk of GUI Lunacy
It takes a monumental amount of effort to layer a decent application / graphics environment on top of an OS / kernel. Look at how long the Gnome and KDE projects have been going, and how annoying the results can be even after all that time.
A car manufacturer is going to be super reluctant to use someone else's open source GUI environment - all it takes is for the project members to go crazy and suddenly your entire line of cars is sporting a stupid UI that no one actually likes. The Gnome project have done some woefully stupid things in recent times... Can you imagine waking up one morning to find that the latest update for your car has resulted in the same kind of UI downgrade that happened when Gnome went from 2.x to 3.x?
So I think it will take a long time to do something new with AGL. Android has already gone through a lot of development, and it's always going to be a tough choice between selling one's soul to Google and going it alone...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
