TUX RACER

Dan Cauchy brings Jonni Bidwell up to  speed on Automotive Grade Linux, coming  soon to a car – or even a boat – near you!

- Jonni Bidwell 

Dan Cauchy is executive director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation. Before that he was VP of Automotive at MontaVista, which was a pioneer of embedded Linux. And before that he was a board member for the GENIVI Alliance, which was instrumental in getting car manufacturers to adopt open source, standards-based IVI (invehicle infotainment) systems.

AGL isn’t so much about self-driving cars as powering its infotainment and instrumentation systems. We actually met Dan before, back in LXF218. But you can imagine things move fast in the world of cars, and also we like Dan, so we thought a catch-up was well in order. As luck would have it, both he and roving reporting unit Jonni Bidwell were at October 2019’s Open Source Summit in Lyon, where the following exchange ensued…

Linux Format: How did you get into open source and automotive software?

Dan Cauchy: I was a general manager and VP of the automotive business at MontaVista Software. MontaVista was a really pioneering company, in that it was the first to identify that Linux could be put into devices. Things like Canon printers, Sony ebook readers, the PlayStation 3… these are all things that Montavista did the kernel for. They were known as a Linux kernel guru company.

Eventually, among those things we got into automotive and I ran that whole division. We were the first to put Linux in a vehicle, I can’t mention which vehicle any more, but your readers can easily look that up on the Internet. I was on the board of directors for the GENIVI Alliance and I was the chairman of the compliance programme. So that more or less propelled me into this whole Linux-incars world, and AGL became an obvious thing for me.