Upon 2020

Why Bosch thinks the #IoT needs to be open-source

Matt Asay points to a key slide in a recent Bosch presentation:

Here we have a $40+ billion dollar company, which concludes:

  • 2-5 major IoTS platforms (in next 5-7 years)
  • At least one of them will be Open Source
  • Bosch not able to develop one of these proprietary platforms alone and customers/partners would not accept it
  • Conclusion: Platform strategy with [open-source software]

I think there are better reasons. Like making more innovation happen, more interoperability, and less lock-in, all of which is going to benefit everybody in the long term. And less possibility of information hoarding by the big cloud providers.

But whatever everybody’s reasons, let’s make the internet of things predominantly open. That’d be nice.

Johannes Ernst

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