MANCHESTER, England Codethink announced that it has successfully achieved a positive and complete Functional Safety Assessment for the Eclipse Trustable Software Framework (TSF).
Performed by exida, a globally recognised authority in functional safety, the assessment was conducted in accordance with IEC 61508 requirements, with domain experts ensuring full alignment and compatibility with ISO 26262, the automotive industry’s functional safety standard. The evaluation represents a major milestone in Codethink’s mission to transform how the world engineers, verifies, and trusts software.
According to the assessment, “considering the process objectives of both IEC 61508 and ISO 26262, the specification of Trustable [Trustable Software Framework] and the reference implementation that maps Trustable tenets and assertions to the objectives in IEC 61508, it is determined that Trustable sets out an approach to software development which meets and in many cases exceeds the rigor and expectations established for software in IEC 61508 at SIL 3.”
The report further concludes that “organizations that attempt to implement TSF according to the reference model may proceed confidently that they will be able to measure their progress towards a future certification attempt safe in the knowledge that the requirements for a successful assessment will be met.”
“This assessment validates that trust in software, especially open source, can be both measurable and auditable,” said Paul Sherwood, Codethink’s Chairman. “Functional safety is no longer a checkbox, it’s a design principle. The Eclipse Trustable Software Framework gives organizations the means to demonstrate integrity at every stage of development.”
The Eclipse Trustable Software Framework defines six tenets, Provenance, Construction, Changes, Expectations, Results, and Confidence, each mapped to the objectives of IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. This structure enables companies to align open source and proprietary development with safety-critical rigor, ensuring traceability and reproducibility from concept to deployment.
By embedding these principles directly into everyday engineering workflows, TSF bridges the long-standing divide between compliance and innovation. It provides regulators, insurers, and developers with a shared language for evaluating and improving the trustability of complex software systems.
This Functional Safety Assessment follows a series of Codethink milestones, including the contribution of the TSF to the Eclipse Foundation, as well as the successful baseline safety assessment of CTRL OS using the TSF.
“We remain focused on the real work of engineering safety, security, and reliability, not simply collecting certificates,” added Sherwood. “At its core, this is about trust: Trust that software will behave as intended, and trust that our systems and mitigations will perform when it matters most.”
