Today, we did a press release about the success we are having creating an open source community for the M2M industry and the Internet of Things (IoT). TechCrunch has a very nice article about why this is important.
I believe we are seeing three trends that will accelerate the adoption of open source in the M2M and IoT industry:
1. The current M2M solutions are proprietary and don’t interoperate. The Internet was successful because it is based on open standards and open source. If it was not for http, tcp/ip, Linux, Apache web server, does anyone believe we would have the Internet like we have today. If we are going to have the Internet of Things it needs to be open – open standards and open source. No one company will be able to profit by using proprietary protocols or by selling proprietary implementations.
2. Open hardware makes open source for M2M a reality. The rise of Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the Beagle board has made it possible to create open source projects that run on cheap and accessible hardware. Previous, an open source project would be required to target a vendors hardware board, which isn’t very ‘open’. Now projects like we are hosting at Eclipse M2M can use the Raspberry Pi for the reference platform but also run on commercial hardware. This breaks down the barriers for developers to get going and provides them a migration path to more industrial-grade hardware.
3. The big opportunity for M2M and IoT is big data. A lot of the big data technology for processing and analyzing big data is focused on the web data but the M2M data is coming. Big data for the web is big, big data for M2M is enormous data. The big data and enterprise vendors will be motivated to ensure the data is transported and packaged using open standards and open source. They will want as many devices talking to their back-end systems so proprietary formats will be doomed. Big data will drive an open approach to M2M and IoT.
Eclipse M2M aspires to be the community that provides the open source technology for M2M software development. We are off to a great start but there is a lot of work still to be done. If you want to help make M2M and IoT successful then why not join us. Open source is going to be the driving force for the success of M2M and IoT.
