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Eclipse Foundation and Germany’s VDA Expand Open-Source Vehicle Software Pact to 32 Companies

• By John K. Waters
• January 7, 2026

The Eclipse Foundation, an international non-profit that hosts hundreds of open-source software projects, and Germany’s automotive industry association, VDA, say they have expanded an industry memorandum to build an "automotive-grade" open-source software ecosystem for software-defined vehicles.

The expanded memorandum of understanding was announced on Wednesday at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, according to the VDA, bringing the total number of participating companies to 32, up from 11 when the group launched in June 2025.

The group's new signatories include Stellantis and Traton, supplier Schaeffler, and chipmakers Infineon and Qualcomm, VDA said. Additional companies listed in the announcement include Accenture, Capgemini, Cummins, Elektrobit, LG Electronics, Michelin, QNX, Red Hat, and T-Systems.

Organizers say the goal is to reduce duplicated work on what they call "non-differentiating" vehicle software by developing shared components under vendor-neutral governance. They said the effort is designed to achieve up to a 40% reduction in development, integration, and maintenance effort for such software, and up to 30% faster time to market.

"The growing participation in this collaboration reflects a clear global shift toward open innovation in the automotive industry," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, in the announcement.

VDA managing director Marcus Bollig said the joint approach could let companies redirect engineering resources toward features that differentiate their vehicles.

The collaboration is being implemented through the Eclipse Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) Working Group, a project umbrella under the Eclipse Foundation that develops and promotes open-source software, specifications, and collaboration models for an industry-ready vehicle software platform.

At the center of the MoU effort is Eclipse S-CORE, short for Safe Open Vehicle Core. The Eclipse Foundation describes S-CORE as an open-source core software stack designed for software-defined vehicles, targeting embedded high-performance electronic control units.

In the expansion announcement, organizers said S-CORE brings together multiple SDV projects into a common reference stack and tooling environment intended to support certifiable, production-ready automotive software.

The MoU itself also points to functional safety as a central requirement, calling for a certifiable stack with standardized building blocks and toolchains, and a process aimed at ISO 26262 qualification in an open-source setting.

The initial MoU was signed in June 2025 at the Automotive Electronics Congress in Germany, when 11 companies agreed to pre-competitive cooperation on open-source vehicle software, according to the VDA.

S-CORE was launched publicly the same month as a project within the Eclipse SDV Working Group, with the Eclipse Foundation positioning it as a foundational, safety-oriented stack for software-defined vehicle architectures.

In November 2025, S-CORE delivered its first public release, version 0.5, the organizers said, with a full release planned for 2026 and a target of supporting vehicle programs expected to reach market by 2030 at the latest.

The expansion comes as automakers increase spending on software and compute, seeking to shorten development cycles and manage the rising cost of maintaining code across vehicle lines, while suppliers and semiconductor companies push their own platforms deeper into vehicle architectures.