For decades, the automotive industry assumed the answer was the conference room: draft the document, hold the meeting, reach agreement, then build. Eclipse SDV proposes something else entirely — publish the code first, validate it together, and let that experience produce the standard. What LG Electronics calls "Code First" wasn't just an open-source strategy. It was an argument for rewriting how the auto industry collaborates.

By Sang Min Han _ han@autoelectronics.co.kr
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For a long time, software in the automotive industry came down to two choices: build it yourself (Make) or buy it (Buy). But on July 1, on the stage of Automotive Innovation Day 2026, hosted by this publication at Suwon Convention Center, Chulhee Lee — SDV Software Platform Project Leader at LG Electronics and Eclipse SDV Korea Ambassador — argued that this old binary no longer holds.
"We chose Collaboration, a third option between the existing choices of Make and Buy."
That single line captures most of what his talk was about. Why LG Electronics builds automotive software as open source, shares code with competitors, and why Korea — long a country that followed standards — is trying to become one that sets them: the answer to all of it starts with this third option, Collaboration.



Between Make and Buy

Lee began by explaining why the industry had no choice but to reach for this unfamiliar third option.
"In the traditional auto industry, companies either built software themselves or bought it and used it. But when everyone builds their own, the software stack keeps growing — and in the SDV era it grows even faster — while the number of available developers stays fixed."
The first trap of Make was a war for talent. Lee pointed to a second one as well: "Also, when you try to develop everything yourselves down to the last detail, you end up missing delivery deadlines."
Could Buy have been the alternative? Lee shakes his head. "From the buyer's side, whether you're purchasing hardware or software, the dependency runs deep — on the current version, on the next model, on the model after that. It's a real burden. And if you end up locked into a platform that turns out not to be the standard, that's an even bigger problem."
Build, and you run out of people. Buy, and you mortgage your future. Facing that dilemma, the industry arrived at collaboration. Lee summed it up in an analogy: "We didn't think we needed to reinvent the wheel dozens of times over."
That's how the Eclipse SDV Working Group launched in March 2023, bringing automakers and suppliers together at the same table. But the principle this group set for itself looked nothing like what "collaboration" usually implies.




Three Forms of Open-Source Organization



"Open the Source Code First"

The automotive industry has always been an industry of regulation and paperwork. Lee put it plainly: "Everyone in this industry is very good at writing documents. Requirements documents, meeting materials, and meeting materials to prepare for other meetings — you all do that extremely well."
Document → meeting → standard → development. That sequence has run the auto industry for more than half a century. Discuss it in a meeting, write it up, get every stakeholder to sign off on a standard, and only then start writing code. The problem is that this order takes far too long.
Eclipse SDV flipped the sequence entirely. Instead of setting the standard first and writing code to match it, you write the code first, test it against everyone else's code, and only then lock in the standard. Code → validation → standard. Lee described it this way: "Eclipse SDV decided to try a slightly different path. Open the source code first. Match it against each other's code, and build the standard on what actually worked in practice."
Multiple companies bring the code they've each written, test it against one another, and whichever combination actually works becomes the standard. A standard isn't agreed to on paper in a conference room — it's made when different companies' code actually runs together and works. This is the "Code First" philosophy.
Why did this reversal become necessary? The answer lies in the origin story of the Eclipse Foundation itself, which Lee used to frame the talk. In 2001, when IBM open-sourced the Eclipse IDE, the industry response was distrust rather than enthusiasm — the concern being: how can we trust a solution opened up by IBM? To get past that distrust, the Eclipse Foundation was established in 2004 as a vendor-neutral governance body that no single company controls.
Lee summarized that history this way: "It was built on the idea that this shouldn't be open source — it should be open collaboration. I actually think that's the real starting point of this whole talk." Not documents but code, not hierarchy but trust — he stressed that the very way the auto industry builds standards is changing.




The Six Tenets of the Eclipse Trustable SW Framework


People Before Code

But publishing code alone doesn't add up to collaboration. As Lee put it: "Anyone can put source code on GitHub. But if changes to that project, how it's run, and what direction it's headed in aren't agreed on with other companies and stakeholders, you can't call it collaboration. It's just a solo, single-vendor project."
What Lee defines as real collaboration — Open Collaboration — demands something different: multiple stakeholders agreeing together on a project's direction and rules. And what holds that structure up is people.
"No matter how good a project is, without people it eventually stalls and dies. The reason competitors were actually able to share code with each other comes down to relationships between people. The core of collaboration isn't code — it's the relationships between people, the trust between people."
That trust is exactly why companies that compete with each other, or sit in supplier-client relationships — BMW and Mercedes-Benz, LG Electronics and Bosch and Hyundai Mobis — could end up at the same table.
Asked whether open source is safe, Lee answered with the same logic. Behind worries about safety or security sits a deeper absence of trust: not knowing who built it, or how anyone is held accountable. The answer isn't to police that with more technology — it's to build up evidence and prove trust that way instead.



From Following Standards to Making Them

This philosophy is now becoming reality in Korea, too. An Eclipse SDV community event LG Electronics hosted in Seoul in December 2025 drew roughly 120 people — OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, semiconductor companies, cloud providers, startups, and universities. That turnout convinced Lee that open source could work in Korea as well.
LG Electronics had three reasons for going open source, Lee said: "First, standards. The question was whether to wait for a standard to emerge and follow it, or to get in early and shape the standard ourselves within the non-differentiating parts of the stack — and we chose the latter. We decided to build the standard. Second, we wanted to demonstrate our software capability. And finally, we recognized that no single company can achieve SDV alone." LG's Pullpiri and Timpani are the outcome of that decision.
And this movement isn't limited to LG Electronics. Hyundai Mobis released its own open-source project, SSAM, earlier this year, and K-SDV — a standardization consortium with 81 member companies — is running its own collaborative effort toward SDV standards. The government has thrown its weight behind this too: in late May 2026 it opened three national R&D programs covering an SDV national standard, an open-source-based AI-SDV platform, and SDV middleware development. Each runs 42 months and is worth roughly 14.99 billion won. What began as an individual company's choice has become a national standardization strategy.
"It's genuinely encouraging that Korea has started asking how it can build SDV standards and take them global, rather than staying where it was," Lee said.
He closed with three sentences: "First, I don't believe SDV can ever be built by a single company alone. Second, the core of open source isn't code — it's collaboration. Third, Korea is no longer in the position of following. It's moving into a position of building standards together, and we need to move there faster."
According to the talk, competition in the SDV era is no longer about who holds the most software. It's about who gets into the ecosystem that's building the standard, and how fast. Code First, as LG Electronics described it, was one answer to that question. And that standard is no longer being written in a conference room.







The closing keynote at AID 2026 may itself have been the first demonstration of the Collaboration that Eclipse SDV describes. This publication had originally asked a European representative from the Eclipse Foundation to give the talk, but a scheduling conflict made that impossible. Eclipse SDV then connected us with Lee, who leads the project on LG's side. The speaker changed, but the message Eclipse SDV wanted to deliver carried through intact. Collaboration was already underway well before Lee's talk ever began.

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