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visible to the whole community, has made this so called “bazaar” process [17]
to a much more robust methodology compared with any other proprietary
development scheme. According to several research projects, OSS projects in
general tend to find malicious code faster than closed source projects, which
is indicated for example in the average life time of so called “backdoors”, a
potential security threat, which might exist in closed source software for sev-
eral month or even years, while having an average survival time of days or
few weeks, at the most, in the case of well managed OSS projects [3], [4], [5],
[32]. Figure 8 demonstrates the principle information and source code flow
for a typical FLOSS development set-up.
Fig. 8. The classical “Stone Soup Development Methodology” often applied in Open
Source Software projects according to [3], where the “User” in most cases is also
active as “Developer”, which need to be adapted to the rail sector, where “Users”
my be more in a reporting rather “developing” role. Only “trusted developers” are
privileged to make changes to the source code in the “trusted repository”, all others
have “read only” access.
It is not in question that well acknowledged and mandatory rules and
regulations according to state of the art R&D processes and procedures (e.g.
EN 50128) have to be applied to any software part in order to get approval
from safety authorities before going into revenue service.
While open source eco-systems in the IT industry are generally driven by
users, having the expertise and therefore being in a position to contribute
to the software source code themselves, so it seems unlikely for the railway
segment to find many end users of embedded control equipment for ETCS
(here: railway operators or railway vehicle owners), who will have this level of
expertise. Therefore the classical OSS development concept and organization
has to be adapted to the railway sector.
Figure 9 shows a proposal for an open source software development eco-
system for openETCS utilizing a neutral organization to coordinate the so-
called “co-competition” business model for cooperating several competing
