The Internet of Things and Open Source (Extended Abstract) - Interoperability and Open-Source Solutions for the Internet of Things - page 2

are not incompatible and devices implementing both paradigms are already populating
the nascent IoT. They differ principally in terms of who promotes which: Many Leaves is
the logical province of semiconductor suppliers and embedded software vendors, as well
as adherents to the maker movement. Many Peers is the darling of systems vendors and
enterprise software suppliers.
There are dozens of ways to monetize open source in general no two companies

working in or around open source are alike in the mix of tactics they employ. At a
conceptual level, OSS business models

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t into the following four major categories:
building OSS, building with OSS, building for OSS and building on OSS.
A stark distinction exists between vertical integration and horizontal diversity
which are two approaches to populating the different technical tiers of the IoT. These
approaches have important implications for collaboration and interoperability. There
already exists a range of silos of IoT devices and protocols, but do not interoperate with
nearly identical devices from other vendors. With a single IoT tier, there also exist less
ambitious and more open suppliers. These companies offer fewer devices and device
types but strive to interoperate with similar gear from other vendors and with third-
party infrastructure devices as well. To achieve quality interoperability, vendors across
tiers must implement using open IoT standards vs. enabling interoperation only with
their own devices.

3 The Roles of Open Source in the IoT Build Out

While open source is and will continue to be instrumental to the IoT, its presence and
utility is not uniform across all elements of the network as shown in Table 1 .

Table 1. Open source in the IoT stack

In practice, end points belong to one of the following categories: passive nodes,
simple end points and peer-level end points. The role of OSS in the passive nodes lies
not in the RFID tags and slugs themselves but in the equipment that energizes and
scans them, and in supporting the applications that act upon the data. The role of OSS
in simple end points is tactical and not guaranteed. OEMs may choose to use an open