Mediaboss Marketing

By Jack M. Germain 02/25/15 5:00 AM PT

Technology wars are predictable. Every new wave of gadgetry brings a fight over who will be the next king of the software hill. The next big battle is brewing over control of the Internet of Things marketplace.

The IoT is quietly gaining momentum as companies develop software to connect all sorts of consumer products to the Internet. Consumers see only convenience and extensions to their always-on mobile devices. Product makers see a pathway to streaming data that can be monetized from buyers' connections.

Could history be ripe for repeating itself as open source begins to take on the current, yet unsustainable, walled-garden core of the IoT? Based on the victories in some early skirmishes, innovations developed by open source start-ups may be the David in the here-again fight against proprietary Goliaths.

In past technology battles, the one deciding factor was grounded to who could force adoption of a platform standard. Might made Right, and to the victor went the spoils.

Today's skirmish line victory could well be settled by that same factor. But the "might making right" could well be the purchasing power driven by open source vendors.

"The driver goal is with the developers. If you drive the developer ecosystem, you are more likely to find what I would call the Angry Bird of IoT," Maarten Ectors, vice president of IoT, proximity cloud and next-gen networking at Ubuntu/Canonical, told LinuxInsider.

The lack of IoT standards is nothing new. It was evident with application servers and operating systems. These technologies always start with something proprietary and then somebody wants to commoditize that layer because they wanted to offer something on top, according to Ectors.

In the IoT industry, the battle for standards is more complex. Normally in those markets the victor could control the whole market.

"I don't think in IoT there will be one person controlling everything. It is so complex. In that case what is easier is one platform that everybody can use rather than a walled garden," he explained.

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Open Source vs. Proprietary Firms on the IoT Battleground