The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) recently published a survey about the trends of open source and open standards in the telecommunication industry. Like some other standards groups, OMA has noticed a trend in developer-led adoption of standards and the importance of open source to attract developers. The Eclipse IoT Working Group has been working closely with OMA on the Lightweight M2M (LWM2M) standard implementation in Eclipse Leshan and Eclipse Wakaama.
The survey results are interesting since the OMA members and community is mostly in the telecommunication industry. Teleco’s aren’t typically participating in the Eclipse community so a survey of this industry is of interest.
The complete survey result is available from the OMA web site. Here are some highlights:
- An increasing participating rate in open source
52% of the respondents are already participating in open source projects and 57% think their participation will be increasing. The overall participation rate is what I would expect. Lots of organizations in the telecommunication industry really don’t participate in open source. However, it is great to see the participation rate is expected to increase.
- Open standards + Open source is the future
Over 80% of the respondents identified the trend ‘Open source implementations of open standard specifications’ as the dominant trend over the next several years. This confirms the mission of the Eclipse IoT community to be the source of key IoT specifications, like OMA LWM2M, OneM2M, MQTT, CoAP and others.
- Closer partnership between open standards and open source communities
I firmly believe open standards and open source implementations are required to encourage widespread adoption of technology. The survey respondents seem to agree, 70% agree the role of open standards is different than open source and 80% agree open standards can benefit from a closer relationships with open source communities. The main reason given were: 1) early open source implementations of standards can provide feedback to improve the standard, and 2) open source implementations help with dissemination and proliferation of the standard.
This is certainly our experience of providing open source implementations of standards like MQTT and LWM2M. As Benjamin Cabe recently presented, the Eclipse Foundation has a lot of success working with open standards groups. If IoT is going to be successful we need to develop these close relationships with some of the key standard groups like the OMA.
- Eclipse IoT is well positioned in the telecommunication industry
The Eclipse Foundation was the #1 open source community with over 30% of the participants indicating they are participating in an open source community. My assumption is this is due to the work in Eclipse Leshan and Eclipse Wakkama on OMA LWM2M and Eclipse OM2M on OneM2M.
I look forward to working more closely with the OMA and the telecommunication partners. The future of IoT is definitely based on open standards and open source!
