The Power of Collaboration and Open Source

A few days ago, the Eclipse Foundation announced a collaboration between three big companies for developing the “Internet of Things” open source platform of the future under the Eclipse IoT umbrella: Red Hat, Bosch, and Eurotech.

Yesterday, most of the Eclipse IoT Day sessions were focused on the projects that these companies are leading in order to build such a platform; three names that you should remember: Kura, Hono, and Kapua.

From devices and gateway on the field to IoT connectivity at scale to cloud services for gathering insights from data and controlling devices. You can find a lot of information about these projects on the related official websites and public repositories, so it’s not my intention to bring them into this post but just sharing my impressions about the power of collaboration and open source.

Let me just share a picture of the vision that Red Hat has about this IoT platform involving a broader ecosystem of open source projects — not only from the Eclipse Foundation but even from the Apache Foundation.

For sure you have heard of Eclipse IoT projects but there's plenty more here. There's the Apache Qpid Dispatch Router for connectivity and messaging at scale, thanks to an AMQP router network, Vert.x-based microservices for handling devices connectivity and protocols translation, the ActiveMQ Artemis broker for the “store and forward” needs, AMQP-Spark Streaming integration for real-time analytics, and finally, future Apache Kafka support.

All the best open source projects for a great IoT platform!

From Closed Source to Open Sourcing

For a long time, I worked in a company with closed source products — using closed source products. In my spare time, I decided to start sharing my knowledge and improving it developing open source software and, I have to say, it changed my life.

From that time on, I gave something to the community, but I received 10 times what I have put in. Thanks to open sourcing what I was doing, my knowledge has increased exponentially because developers all around the world were able to see my code giving me suggestions and improvements.