The competition between Microsoft and Open Source software reaches into the automotive space with the announcement of a new alliance amongst automakers and technology providers called Genivi. The goal of the alliance is to build a Linux stack that will provide a common architecture for automotive infotainment systems.

A new industry alliance, Genivi, has been launched and aims to bring open source to "In-Vehicle Infotainment". Genivi, a non-profit organisation, has been founded by car makers BMW, General Motors and Peugeot Citroën, component makers Delphi, Magneti Marelli and Visteon, CPU maker Intel and embedded systems developer Wind River.

The struggling automotive industry needs to embrace open software platforms if it wants to cash in on the growing automotive telematics and infotainment business, says an ABI Research white paper. Partnerships with Linux technology companies are cited by ABI as potential avenues for success.

The Linux Foundation has announced that the GENIVI Alliance has selected the MeeGo software platform as the basis of their next reference release for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) for car companies including BMW and General Motors

Launched in February, the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) came together to help open-source application vendors make their products work better together and gain visibility among enterprise users.

It has been roughly four months since Red Hat, Synnex, Alfresco, EnterpriseDB and other open source companies unveiled the Open Source Channel Alliance. The effort aims to promote open source applications and Linux to IT consultants, integrators and resellers. Here are the top three questions I plan to pose to the alliance on Aug. 3.

I wrote recently that the “five ages of vendor-led open source revenue strategies” I’d come up with wasn’t suitable for vendors that build a business around community-led projects.

Oracle has an open source crediblity gap.

Fact is that many in the open source movement distrust Oracle’s motives in buying Sun and taking over such blue-chip open source names as Java, mySQL, Open Solaris and OpenOffice.org.

I recently spent some time talking with Christine Martino, Hewlett-Packard's vice president of Linux and open source, about HP's plans to provide services around open-source software. That HP is doing this is now old news (the news broke this week). But the truly interesting thing in this is HP itself.