Wind River and Intel are putting their heads together to create an extensible open source Linux platform for the automotive industry – an infotainment (gad, that horrid word) platform for Intel’s newfangled Atom chip.

It's part of a major new product strategy for Wind River, which is going to open source the specification and code from the platform at Moblin.org in hopes of creating Open Infotainment Platforms that everybody uses and that attract a vibrant ecosystem.

Wind thinks it could be the makings of new business models and products in the (gad) infotainment market.

It expects to deliver the spec and code to Moblin in August. Wind’s own Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment, which is supposed to be sensitive to time-to-market and development cost issues, won’t be available until the fourth calendar quarter.

It claims the support of BMW, Bosch, Delphi and Magneti Marelli and says its widgetry will be pre-integrated with third-party networking and multimedia applications like Bluetooth, DVD playback from Corel’s LinDVD, Gracenote’s music management and automatic playlisting technologies, Parrot’s echo-cancellation and noise reduction solutions, and Nuance’s speech-recognition and speech-to-text technologies.

Need we say that Microsoft plays in this area?

Its SYNC product is proprietary and currently exclusive to Ford. But SYNC only offers voice-to-text and plug-in capability with MP3 players.