Open and Inner Source

At Bosch, we firmly believe that open source benefits everyone involved! Indeed, it is the collaboration in the development of technology to solve real-world problems where we see the full value of open source.

Open source software has been in use at Bosch for a long time both internally and in our products. We're also contributing to and championing open-source projects.

Open source is a core element of our corporate strategy.

As part of Bosch Research, we work on open source projects to

• co-create de-facto standards with others in industry and academia, e.g. the Robotic Operating System (ROS) or the Application Platform Project for MultiCore (Eclipse APP4MC)
• openly collaborate in publicly funded projects, e.g. Eclipse Kuksa being developed within APPSTACLE (ITEA3 15017)
• publish “academic open source” software, i.e. software published in conjunction with scientific papers allowing the presented research results to be reproduced, e.g. Probabilistic Recurrent State-Space Models (paper, code)

Some of Bosch Research's open source activities:

Our commitment to open source goes beyond contributing to and championing open-source projects. We also take the lessons learned from developing open source and apply them to the way we develop software internally. This is known as InnerSource. InnerSource has become a key driver for a cultural change within Bosch toward more openness, transparency, voluntariness, self-determination, and meritocracy – in short: community. What's special about InnerSource at Bosch is that it does not just focus on making software development more efficient by sharing resources for developing shared components, but also takes on the role of an incubator for new, innovative products and aims at providing an attractive working environment for our developers.

InnerSource at Bosch started in 2009 at Bosch Research and has become a global success over the years. We now have thousands of our developers from countries all over the world and from over 150 business units on our internal Social Coding platform, and the numbers are growing steadily. We have also gained a stellar reputation for our implementation of InnerSource in the InnerSource Commons, an open, international community of InnerSource practitioners and researchers, where we share our lessons learned and work to advance the state of InnerSource adoption in the world.