Why The Internet of Things Will Be Open

One prediction that I feel confident about making is that if the Internet takes off, it will be based on open standards. Even more than the Internet, the Internet of things will have such a huge number of companies involved that it will be impossible for any one of them to impose a proprietary standard.

I suspect, too, that alongside open standards, open source will also be hugely important in this area for a couple of reasons.

One is that huge variety of devices I mentioned. It will be impossible for any one company or even group of companies to write the necessary code for the millions of different systems that will be joining the Internet of things. The only way for this to work is if the code is open source, so that manufacturers - and hackers - can simply adapt it for their own favourite device. That's precisely what has happened with some of the most successful code in the field of mobile phones...