Community Projects¶
Over the years, Siemens has been steadily increasing collaboration with open source projects.
Below is a list of some of the major community projects we have been involved in.
Linux & Embedded¶
Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP)¶
The CIP project is focused on providing an open source "base layer" of industrial grade software, including the super long-term supported CIP kernel. We co-founded this project in 2016, are now benefiting greatly from this community effort and are driving significant contributions.
coreboot¶
Providing a fast, open, and secure solution for firmware, coreboot is perfectly suited to be part of our open source stacks. We have been contributing drivers as well as core functionality in coreboot.
isar¶
Designed to combine the knowledge from building in Debian and Yocto, isar enables repeatable generation of Debian-based root filesystems with customizations. It is sponsored by and widely used at Siemens for creating reusable layers.
SWUpdate¶
SWUpdate has become the de-facto open source industry standard for software updates in embedded devices - including at Siemens. As such, we are also heavily involved and contribute to the upstream project.
u-boot¶
U-boot powers a variety of Siemens Embedded devices and we contribute regularly upstream. A growing number of Siemens boards are available in the U-boot source tree.
xenomai¶
Xenomai provides resource-efficient real-time support for applications integrated into the Linux environment. Since we've been using it in multiple products, Siemens has been a key contributor for many years.
source.denx.de/Xenomai/xenomai
License & Compliance¶
fossology¶
Fossology runs license, copyright and export control scans on your project, providing a clear picture using standard SPDX exports and human-readable files for distribution. It has helped automate our development efforts, and we have been involved in its development and maintenance for years.
Additional tools and libraries for FOSSology available as OSS:
sw360¶
Managing licensing for large numbers of software components can be tedious, and SW360 aims to automate and provide an overview for licensing workflows. It acts as a central hub providing a UI portal and as an API, and integrates with Fossology and other compliance tooling. Developed at Siemens and Bosch, it is now under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation.
Additional tools and libraries for SW360 available as OSS:
DevOps¶
GitLab¶
Siemens has been contributing to GitLab for years, and our contributions have garnered GitLab MVP awards in 17.0, 16.1, 14.7, 14.5, 13.10, 13.4, 12.8, 12.7, 12.6, 10.8, 9.5, and 8.16. If our users report issues, we don't wait for tickets - we fix them upstream.
Some of our contributions you might have enjoyed if you use GitLab include x509-signed commits, test coverage visualization, admin mode, exploring and managing project topics, following users, along with many more features and bugfixes!
Read more on our DevOps journey at GitLab.
python-gitlab¶
We try to automate as much of our infrastructure as possible, and keeping healthy libraries that power Infrastructure as Code is an essential part of this. Since 2018, Siemens has been helping maintain the python-gitlab library along with our friends in the community.
renovate¶
Keeping our software up-to-date and secure is among our highest priorities, and we've worked to incorporate seamless dependency updates in our workflows. We continue contributing features to renovate so that more and more technologies and languages we use can benefit from continuous updates.
Running a large GitLab instance, we've also focused on renovate's bot workflow itself. This led us to discover a security risk and to collaborate with renovate, along with GitLab, to provide its GitLab Bot security guidelines.
Web of Things¶
Web of Things describes a set of standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for the interoperability of different Internet of Things (IoT) platforms and application domains. WoT standards have been created by Siemens and other W3C members to counter further fragmentation in the IoT. In this context, several tools and implementations have been developed to support the adoption of this new set of standards.
Siemens also supports the development of other open-source Web of Things projects such as WebThings (previously known as Mozilla WebThings), node-opcua and more.
Eclipse ediTDor¶
A tool for simply designing WoT Thing Descriptions and Thing Models.
Eclipse Thingweb¶
Eclipse Thingweb™ offers multiple components that leverage the W3C WoT standards, which can be used for improving an existing solution or building a new one. Relevant components are listed below and more information can be found on Thingweb.io.
node-wot¶
node-wot is a Web of Things implementation in Node.js that allows interaction with IoT devices or to build IoT devices that support the WoT standards.
Playground¶
Playground is a set of tools around WoT Thing Descriptions that allow to validate them or transform them to other API description formats.
EXI and E-Mobility¶
The Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format is a very compact representation for the Extensible Markup Language (XML).
ISO 15118 is the vehicle to grid (V2G) communication interface using the EXI format.
EXIficient¶
An open source implementation of the W3C Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) format specification.
OpenV2G¶
Project to support the ISO and IEC standardization process to specify the so called "Vehicle 2 Grid Communication Interface" (V2G CI) which became the ISO IEC 15118 specification by now.