Embedded

Oct 15, 2025

Interview: Gaël Blondelle, Embedded track leader

Can you describe to us in few words your track?

The Embedded Track is about initiatives to use Open Source in industries that create Embedded Systems like Automotive, Railway, Energy, Aerospace or Telecommunications. Even if Open Source has been well adopted for Operating Systems and a lot of IT domains for years, the adoption in Embedded Systems is still new. Initiatives like Genivi, PolarSys or the use of Embedded Linux are game changers as they set a common field for open source tools or middleware and enable users to « Take Back Control ».

What are the uses that you identify today and in the future?

Today, almost every tool or middleware exists or will soon exist in open source. In new domains like Internet of Things or Big Data, technology platform are directly created in open source. I would say that the present is already about Open Innovation enabled by Open Source platforms. In Embedded Systems, the futur is certainly with Open Hardware as promoted with the Babylonware project that aims at collaborating on open hardware designs for common parts of critical embedded systems. Examples include the controllers to connect to standard communication buses in cars or aircrafts. Another important part of such initiatives is at the core of « Take Back Control » when large companies use Open Source as a mean to adapt the tools to their processes instead of creating processes that work with the existing tools. Also, it proves to be the only model that guarantees the capability to support tools as long as they are needed when you create embedded systems that lasts for 40 years.

Does it remains technological challenges to overcome?

I was recently attending a meeting where people claimed that with new (open source) tools, they were able to gain 30% in productivity with better predictability and better quality. So definitely, there are new challenges but again, it is interesting to see that some new innovative approaches are directly created as Open Source platforms, even in the domain of Embedded Systems. Think about technologies that appear at Eclipse to develop or debug for multi-core technologies. Another challenge for open source is that some people still think that it is not possible to use Open Source in certified environments because you need to freeze the tools whereas in open source, you can always change the tools. Of course, you can answer that configuration management is also possible with Open Source, that you can « sign » a release to make sure you won’t modify the content, … But such questions are significative that we still have a lot of work to educate/evangelize the myths and reality about Open Source.

In which way the Open Source ecosystem is important in this subject?

First, the sustainability of Open Source solutions when you move from a proprietary model where you have to rely on a contractual relationship with a tools vendor to a model where you have to invest (either internally or externally) on skilled people. It is fundamental when you create systems that last for more 20 years. Sometimes,with no choices to easily patch the system (think about satellite for example). And a good open source ecosystem is the key to have access to more skilled people, to people who use the same best practices, to people who share a common culture both technical and in terms of practices. Second: Open Innovation. It is much easier for companies in Embedded Systems domains that use to use patents, NDA, … to collaborate on an open platform, including collaborating with academics that bring innovations in the platform. Of course, it starts on non core-business topics like development tools, … But as I said before, it will soon come to common hardware parts. Third, Interoperability. Embedded Systems developers have been used to have large migration projects from closed tools to other closed tools. Of course, Open Source does not remove the need to sometimes migrate to a new generation of tools or middleware But with open formats and open source to handle these formats, it is much easier to do such migrations.

Made by Laurent Séguin, French speaking Libre Software Users' Association President