To fully embrace Open Source means to become a good citizen of the worldwide Open Source community. It doesn't suffice to just “use” Open Source. We want to actively give back, contribute to Open Source and share code of ours that might be useful to the outside world as well.

So please forgive us if we don’t always get everything right with regard to Open Source from the start. As a company whose core business has not traditionally been software development, we still have a lot to learn, in particular from those of you who have already been walking this path before.

I didn't expect them to be this based. I wonder how they'll actually do this.

So theyll let me access the software in one of their car models and modify it as I see fit?

Or is this “yeah our code is open but you cant touch it on any real vehicle. also you cant validate the source code is actually what is deployed”.

Mercedes-Benz FOSS Manifesto - Our commitment to be truly open

by Dr. Wolfgang Gehring, August 02, 2021

Manifesto from 2021.

183 public repos on GitHub

Better than nothing. I'm not going to complain since most companies have nothing. But I did a quick scan of their 183 repos. A third are forks for opening PRs into existing projects. Most of the rest is (seemingly) smaller development utilities and libraries, most haven't seen development in 3-5 years. I didn't see anything with any meat to it pertaining to their cars, but we weren't really expecting that (but can dream!).

This seems like a good thing. As they state, instead of just using OSS they'll contribute back to existing projects and likely release some of their own stuff.

Hopefully they stick to it

At Mercedes-Benz, we are confident enough to know that we have some of the best and most brilliant engineers in the field, and at the same time, we are always curious and keen to learn from everyone out there. So please forgive us if we don’t always get everything right with regard to Open Source from the start. As a company whose core business has not traditionally been software development, we still have a lot to learn, in particular from those of you who have already been walking this path before

This just feels weird for a company to officially state? Maybe im just too use to tech company/startup speak where AGI is literally 2 days away

This is from 2021, why post this now...?

Despite https://www.neowin.net/news/vivaldi-browser-picked-as-the-default-browser-in-the-mercedes-cle-coup/

They should make their cars more home mechanics friendly first