Airbus is banking on open source
The development of vital computer systems to be used and maintained for decades in aerospace and automobile construction is preconditioned on development tools the specifications of which elude most classical software products. Therefore a consortium of companies centered on the aircraft manufacturer Airbus has decided to make sure -- by launching a project dubbed TOPCASED (Toolkit in Open source for Critical Applications & Systems Development) -- that it gets its hands on such tools.
"The object is to obtain a collection of tools that covers the whole development process from system specification to the implementation of hard- and software," the Airbus manager Gérard Ladier explained. Mr. Ladier said that open source had meanwhile attained such a degree of maturity that it was now a credible solution for the creation of innovative, reliable system development tools designed to be maintained over long periods of time.