Why Toyota Should Go Open Source

The software in Toyota's "black boxes" is like having a car with its hood welded shut. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst calls for more openness in autos. Given that a typical luxury car can have more than 100 million lines of software code, ways of reducing the defect rates of software are critical, as users help understand the code and find flaws.

Moore's Law, that the number of transistors on a single chip will double every two years, is one of the most influential technology axioms of the past 40 years. The explosion of computing power and its corresponding precipitous drop in cost have fundamentally changed our society and economy. Everything from coffee makers to refrigerators to automobiles is better, cheaper, and more feature-rich due to the electronics that control them.

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