old-school automotive employees—who cut their teeth in an atmosphere of secrecy and paranoia around protecting trade secrets—extremely nervous. McCullough said that’s outdated thinking.
“People in the auto industry may feel like they can get a leg up if they don’t tell anyone what they’re working on,” he said. “But if there’s sharing, the process of finding bugs and getting things to market is easier. The aim is to normalize this approach, but it requires companies to lean on their software development talent, and that’s huge. That’s probably harder than the intellectual property or process pieces.”
Automotive executives who are struggling to adapt to an open environment should look to Apple’s Tim Cook for inspiration, McCullough said. (After all, he pointed out, if there’s any company more insular and secretive than car manufacturers, it’s Apple.)
At an Apple developer’s conference event on June 13, Cook talked about Swift, the open-source programming language for the company’s operating systems that can be used to create apps. Since releasing Swift a little under two years ago to third-party developers, Cook told the crowd, Apple has seen “an amazing response.” More than 100,000 iOS apps use Swift, and it is now the top language project on GitHub.
Because Swift is open source and easy to learn, it can bring more people into coding, Cook said. To further that goal, Apple is releasing Swift Playground, a free learning platform that teaches kids to code. Apple is also opening up Siri, Maps, and Messages to third-party development.
“It’s cool to see executives care about open-source software,” McCullough said. “The Linux Foundation is equally passionate about open source as GitHub, but they want to fully open it. We’re of the mindset that you can also build a private intellectual propertylayer.”
McCullough said Linux and GitHub have a “10 percent philosophical difference”—which GitHub hopes the auto industry will find more palatable as it takes on the challenge of building autonomous vehicles.
