Tesla releases some of its Model S autonomous driving software to coders

Team OD Updated: May 22, 2018, 01:44 PM IST

Tesla has always been tight-lipped about the finer details and tech behind its popular electric vehicles including the Model S, Model X and now the Model 3. Now, however, the Elon Musk company has just released some of the source code from its autonomous driving car technology to the open source community. The upside of this release is that with a bigger pool of coders looking at the software, bugs or bottlenecks in the system may be found quicker.

This move is not some generous offering from Musk but seems to be the result of Tesla Inc's violation of a General Public License (GPL). The GPL rules require any system built on open platforms such as Linux and BusyBox, as Tesla has, to share their source code, which Tesla had failed to do so far. Hence, Tesla Inc has open-sourced some its software code for its Autopilot semi-autonomous driving technology, as well as for its infotainment system found on the Tesla Model X, and Tesla Model S. The source code is available on open source code review page, GitHub.

Given the ongoing race to develop complete autonomous driving technology systems amongst automobile manufacturers, Tesla has played it smart by releasing only part of the Autopilot framework. This may not be enough for someone to steal it to build their own autonomous tech, but should help outside developers better understand the approach taken by Tesla, and also point out any discrepancies they may find in the process.

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