Industry Collaborations

Companies deploying EmbeddedOS run into problems that are too large for one organisation and too specific for a standards body: hardening a board support package across a product line, validating real-time behaviour under production loads, integrating edge-AI inference with deterministic scheduling. These problems are shared across the industry but solved in isolation, behind closed doors. The Industry Collaborations programme exists to solve them together: applied research with companies deploying EmbeddedOS, in the open.

The Foundation is the natural home for this work. As a 501(c)(3) public charity, it can host collaboration that no single company's roadmap would fund and no standards committee would scope: practical, applied, and published. Results belong to everyone — that is the point.

The programme will run applied research projects with companies deploying EmbeddedOS: jointly defined problem statements, engineers from the participating companies working alongside Foundation engineers and community contributors, and results published openly — code into the MIT-licensed repositories, and reports and data on the website.

Project areas will follow real deployment needs: security analysis of production configurations, performance characterisation, hardware bring-up for new targets, and tooling improvements. Each project will have a published scope and a public record of its outputs. Participation will not buy roadmap influence — technical decisions go through the public governance process, and the programme's agreements will say so explicitly.

Intellectual property terms will be simple and public: work produced in collaboration projects is contributed back under the project's MIT licence, and pre-existing proprietary code stays with its owner but cannot be a dependency of a collaboration's public outputs. The agreements will be published so future participants know the terms before they join.

For companies deploying or evaluating EmbeddedOS in real products — from device makers to integrators — who face hard applied problems and would rather solve them in the open with peers than alone behind closed doors. It is also for their engineers, who get to work on shared problems with the wider community.

For independent engineers and researchers: collaboration projects will be open to community participation, and all outputs will be public, so the results are useful whether or not you were in the room.

The Industry Collaborations programme is planned and has not started. There are no active projects today. Companies interested in applied research collaboration can email partners@embeddedos.org describing the problem area — the Foundation will respond as the programme takes shape.

Independent engineers and researchers who want to take part in future projects can register interest through contact@embeddedos.org. The collaboration model — how projects are proposed, scoped, and staffed — will be published openly before the first project begins.

The first collaborations will likely be small and concrete: a single well-scoped problem, a handful of engineers, a published result. That is deliberate. Trust between companies is built by finishing small things together, and the programme will earn its scale one completed project at a time.

Companies worried about competitive exposure should note the structure: each project publishes its own scope up front, so nothing said to be shared leaks beyond what the participants agreed to share. The openness is bounded by the agreement, and the agreement is public.