Mozilla unveiled “Project Things,” which builds upon standard web technologies and the Web of Things project, and released code that runs on a Raspberry Pi. In March of last year, a few months after Mozilla announced it was shutting down its Firefox OS project for Linux-based mobile phones, it unveiled four Firefox OS based “Connected Devices” projects for the Internet of Things. The Connected Devices project has since shut down, but a website is still available for others to advance the code. Instead, Mozilla turned its IoT team toward an existing Web of Things (WoT) project aimed at developing a decentralized, open source IoT framework built as much as possible using existing World Wide Web technologies.
Mozilla has now announced its own Project Things framework designed to pull together existing Web of Things specifications and code under a global framework comprised of device, gateway, and cloud components. As a starting point, it released a prototype version of a Things Gateway stack that runs on a Raspberry Pi. Vertical IoT silos (left) and Web of Things metalayer (click images to enlarge) Project Things is said to be compatible with WoT and related standardization efforts at the IETF, the W3C, the OGC (SensorThings), and the OCF. The Linux Foundation backed OCF (Open Connectivity Foundation) which is in the process of integrating the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn standard into its IoTivity framework, is probably the largest of the many vendor-agnostic, open source IoT standardization efforts.
Yet most home and industrial IoT vendors more often align themselves with one or more of the IoT ecosystems pushed by a handful of the world’s largest tech companies. All of these stacks include proprietary technology, as well as varying degrees of more open technologies that are more or less controlled by a single company.