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IoT Linux Technology

An Internet of Threads or will there also be Something in Open Source?

Currently I play with IoT devices and connected “things”, and as much they fascinate me, mostly they are quite locked and when the vendor loses interest, money or disappears from the market, these things mutate to ubiquitous threads and begin to scare me.

Sure, most of the stuff is built on Linux, but passwords or access is blocked and if there is no merciful vendor that takes care of automated updates they rot and become vulnerable.

Additionally, sometimes even the communication protocols are unknown, insecure and create a lock-in to the original vendor and its “intellectual property”.

In an ideal world there will be an Open Source based software stack that is capable of a standard based communication, secured connection with controlled data flow and ways to manage the zillions of devices connected to and managed by the central management.

And, although the world is not perfect, something like this seems to exist: In the Eclipse community, there is the IoT Community!

I specifically looked into the IoT device middleware Kura  and the cloud based management platform Kapua.

With these tools and a secure MQTT based communication, an Open Source, standards based IoT stack can created:

Eclipse IoT Stack

This not pure academic stuff, but real code! Interesting companies like Eurotech, Bosch and my employer Red Hat are investing into these projects.

My goal in the coming weeks will be to look deeper into these projects, make them available in an on-premise installation and have a lot of fun. And yes, I will write about that here. So stay tuned.

By Ingo Boernig

I am totally committed to the open source software ideas and principles. Throughout my career I always worked on integrating and extending Open Source solutions in the enterprise market.

I work at Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source software solutions. I'm part of the Solution Architect team, responsible for the logistics, retail, travel and energy industry in Germany.

Before joining Red Hat in 2012 I worked in the services unit of IBM, integrating enterprise open source solutions in large organizations and worked on an open source enterprise architecture.

I started my professional career at SUSE in 1999 where the enterprise open source movement kicked off.

I have a diploma in theoretical physics and got exposed to Linux and Open Source software in the mid-nineties at university.

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