When safety meets open source: Building trust in the software-defined road ahead

"When safety meets open source: Building trust in the software-defined road ahead" presented by Dana Vede from the Eclipse Foundation, explores the fundamentals of functional safety, its role in the automotive industry, and how open source approaches can support safety-critical systems. This session was recorded at Open Community Experience 2026 (OCX26) in Brussels, Belgium, as part of the Open Community for Automotive.

This session explores functional safety in the context of modern automotive systems, focusing on how safety principles apply to software-defined vehicles and how open source development can support these requirements.

It begins by defining functional safety as the ability of a system to behave predictably in response to failures, ensuring that even when faults occur, the system transitions to a safe state. The session highlights the distinction between reliability and safety, emphasising that safety is not about preventing failure, but about controlling system behaviour when failure happens.

The session then examines how safety is implemented through standards such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262, outlining the structured process used in engineering projects. This includes defining requirements, analysing hazards, assessing risks, and implementing mitigation strategies based on severity, exposure, and controllability.

A key focus is on system design and process discipline. The session explains how safety depends on well-defined development processes, traceability across requirements and implementation, and rigorous validation across all levels of testing. It also highlights the importance of safety mechanisms such as redundancy, monitoring, and fallback behaviours to ensure systems can recover safely from faults.

The session connects these principles to the evolution of software-defined vehicles, where increasing system complexity and the introduction of AI-driven features create new safety challenges. It emphasises the need for strong diagnostics, clear specifications, and disciplined engineering practices to maintain safety in this environment.

Finally, the session explores the relationship between functional safety and open source. It highlights how transparency, peer review, and collaborative development can improve defect detection and system robustness, while also addressing the cultural differences between traditional safety approaches and open source models.

Key topics covered
- functional safety fundamentals
- IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 standards
- hazard analysis and risk assessment
- severity, exposure, and controllability
- system behaviour under failure conditions
- safety mechanisms and redundancy
- traceability in software development
- validation and testing strategies
- software-defined vehicles (SDV) and safety challenges
- open source and functional safety collaboration

Why this matters
As vehicles become software-defined systems, safety depends increasingly on software quality and process discipline. This session shows how safety engineering principles must evolve alongside modern development practices, including open source collaboration.

About OCX26
Open Community Experience 2026 is the Eclipse Foundation’s flagship event, held in Brussels, Belgium. It brings together developers, architects, and industry leaders to explore open source technologies across domains including IoT, AI, automotive, and security, with a focus on practical implementation and collaboration. Learn more at https://www.ocxconf.org/

Chapters
00:00 introduction and session overview
03:20 defining functional safety
05:45 safety vs reliability
07:44 types of failures (hardware and systematic)
09:04 safety mechanisms and redundancy
12:21 safety standards (IEC 61508 and ISO 26262)
14:10 hazard analysis and risk mitigation
17:07 safety integrity levels and risk factors
20:24 engineering lifecycle and V-model
28:29 traceability and validation
34:52 SDV safety challenges
42:44 open source and safety culture

Видео When safety meets open source: Building trust in the software-defined road ahead канала Open Community Experience