The M2M industry is in constant flux, growing like a moss in many directions at once. One of the more interesting trends developing is in creating open source platforms upon which to build IoT connections and devices. With initiatives from non-profits and associations like Wind River and leadership from major corporations like Synopsis, it looks like open architecture is gaining momentum.
The newest player to throw a hat into the ring is Panasonic. One March 23, the Japanese electronics giant announced at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose, California that it will provide royalty-free access to software, patents and experience from its M2M product ecosystem, with the goal of encouraging IoT development. The company is already heavily invested in the connected business-to-business solutions space and this pledge to give away all of its device-to-cloud software technology is an aggressive move toward leadership of the open infrastructure space. Panasonic’s systems are already in use in home monitoring, solar energy and retail applications, and by releasing the frameworks, adoption could become systemic, ensuring the brand’s dominance for some time. Think about how Android became the leading mobile OS: by being free.
"Open sourcing a proprietary technology invites the open source community to evaluate, work on and ultimately improve the software,” said Todd Rytting, CTO, Panasonic Corporation of North America. “In a market full of incompatible, proprietary offerings, this initiative brings a powerful tool to developers and equipment makers to help them create what the market wants in the IoT: interoperable and flexible services and applications.”
This is not the first time Panasonic has made a sacrifice of its IP for the betterment of an industry, and itself. In the past, it released key patents to the public domain to help encourage the development of the radio industry, which did pretty well for itself. The company also serves on the board of the AllSeen Alliance, which is dedicated to driving the spread of M2M technology with an open, universal development framework.
Panasonic will contribute its device-to-cloud software open source code to the OpenDOF Project, a non-profit entity the company founded to administer open source IoT software. It will focus on expanding a secure, flexible and interoperable open source software framework to enable the development of scalable and reliable network services from a variety of components and systems including gateways and cloud services. The framework will support different IoT networking technologies, and new deployments as well as legacy systems. It will target services in two major areas: collecting data from devices such as sensors and remote control of devices.
Don’t call Panasonic a rolling stone, because the moss is growing fast.
Edited by
Dominick Sorrentino
