Open Source Register

The Automotive Open Source Register

A neutral, community-curated register of the open-source software that matters for automotive engineering — from the codebases running autonomous stacks and CAN tooling to the new wave of MCP servers wiring hardware debuggers into AI agents. No vendor spin. Just what's live on GitHub and worth knowing.

Most automotive open source lives scattered across GitHub, foundation pages, and half-remembered conference talks. This page is a running index of the projects an automotive-software engineer should actually know — maintained by The New Automotive, a marketplace for modern automotive engineering tools. Inclusion is not endorsement; it's a pointer to work happening in the open.

The headline section below tracks a shift that is happening right now, in public: independent engineers are exposing hardware debuggers — Lauterbach TRACE32, GDB, on-chip probes — to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). It moves the debugger from a human-only console into the agent's toolset.

Foundational Automotive Open Source

The established open-source projects underpinning modern automotive software — autonomy stacks, the software-defined-vehicle data and comms layer, CAN tooling, and embedded runtimes.

openpilot

comma.ai's open-source driver-assistance system, running on hundreds of supported car models; one of the largest open automotive codebases.

Autoware

Open-source software stack for autonomous driving from the Autoware Foundation, built on ROS 2.

Eclipse SDV Working Group

Eclipse Foundation's software-defined-vehicle umbrella: dozens of open-source projects for in-vehicle and vehicle-to-cloud software.

Eclipse Kuksa

Vehicle abstraction layer including the Kuksa Databroker, a gRPC-based broker for vehicle signals using the COVESA VSS model.

COVESA VSS

Standardized data model and catalog for vehicle signals — the common vocabulary for SDV data.

vsomeip

Widely used open-source C++ implementation of SOME/IP, the automotive service-oriented middleware protocol.

Eclipse Zenoh

Pub/sub/query protocol unifying data in motion and at rest, increasingly adopted for vehicle and robotics communication (a ROS 2 middleware option).

Eclipse iceoryx

True zero-copy inter-process communication for safety-oriented, high-throughput automotive systems.

CARLA

Open-source simulator for autonomous driving research, built on Unreal Engine.

can-utils

Linux SocketCAN userspace utilities (candump, cansend & co.) — the everyday toolbox for CAN bus work.

python-can

Python library for CAN bus access across many interfaces; the standard for scripting CAN tooling and tests.

cantools

Python library and CLI for DBC/KCD/ARXML signal databases: encode, decode, and analyze CAN messages.

Zephyr RTOS

Linux Foundation real-time operating system for resource-constrained embedded devices, with broad MCU support.

Renode

Open-source simulation framework for embedded systems: run unmodified firmware for full SoCs and multi-node systems in CI.

Building or maintaining automotive open source?

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