Panasonic Open-sources Software and Patents to Spur Better IoT

Still in its infancy, the IoT market is taking off and the majority of the big vendors are putting their weight behind the coming tsunami of constantly connected devices. Just last week, Microsoft started to better define its participation in this market. Windows 10 is the linchpin for its strategy and I talked through that in Microsoft's Windows 10 IoT Strategy.

With so many companies already trying to one-up the others and develop strategies that could vault themselves as leaders in a young market, it's going to be hard to compete. But, Panasonic thinks it has found a way to both compete and to show leadership.

Panasonic has decided to contribute its software and patents to the IoT revolution. Panasonic is probably not known publicly for its expertise in IoT, but the company has been making connected consumer devices for years.

Panasonic's royalty-free intellectual property has been submitted to the OpenDOF Project, with the intent to make the content freely available to help speed up development and adoption for connected objects. The OpenDOF Project is defined as…

The OpenDOF (Open Distributed Object Framework) Project is a secure, flexible, and interoperable open-source software framework enabling the development of scalable and reliable network services based on connected objects.

OpenDOF is a non-profit organization created by Panasonic, but open to all-comers.

Just like any market, though, it's the startups that produce monumental gains in a technology industry, and I suspect that will happen here, too. A few small companies will advance the market in ways the big guys couldn't, only to be acquired by a larger organization. Agility and ingenuity is key to any new market, and it's extremely rare to see a large vendor move with any noticeable speed. But, supplying royalty-free property could help Panasonic gain an edge – for now.