EU-IoT White Paper Series,
October 2021
For over a decade the Open Source Software (OSS) community has played a significant role in the development, deployment, and standardisation of the Internet of Things (IoT). This is evidenced by the increasing number of OSS projects that are developing essential components for the majority of IoT deployments worldwide, as well as by the number of innovative IoT projects that over the years have been developed and released as open source. Recently, the European Commission (EC) has released a policy brief on Open Source Software, which outlines and acknowledges the importance of OSS for ensuring more rapid innovation in several domains, including the IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This whitepaper aims at providing an overview of the IoT OSS projects landscape including: • A presentation of IoT projects of prominent OSS ecosystems (e.g., Apache, Linux Foundation, Eclipse Foundation), including information on the role of European organisations and European OSS communities within these contexts. • A review and analysis of more than 120 OSS projects covering different IoT themes, including OSS IoT hardware, IoT gateways, IoT device middleware, Edge Computing Middleware, IoT Cloud Platforms, and IoT development environments. The projects are analysed in terms of their different characteristics such as their OSS license, their community size, their acceptance by the OSS community, the language(s) they are written in, as well as the IoT standards that they support or promote. • A presentation of recent open-source developments carried out in EU projects, including the projects of the H2020-ICT56-2020 call that are closely collaborating with the EU-IoT project. Furthermore, the present whitepaper aims at introducing the EU-IoT IoT OSS projects catalogue, which is developed by the H2020 EU-IoT project and is already publicly accessible through the NGIoT website1. The catalogue aims at providing a searchable directory of IoT OSS projects. At the time of writing, it comprises a critical mass of over 100 projects, including most of the projects that are analysed in the scope of this whitepaper. The catalogue is extensible in terms of new projects, as EU-IoT enables the IoT and OSS communities to submit new OSS project entries. Overall, the EU-IoT Open Source project catalogue will facilitate the IoT community to access information about the rich set of available IoT projects through a single entry point. This will alleviate the fragmentation of information about OSS projects, which is currently faced by organizations that wish to use OSS components in their projects