Panasonic to Provide Royalty Free Access to its Internet of Things Technology

Panasonic has announced that it will provide royalty-free access to its software, patents and experience from its product ecosystem for the development of Internet of Things (IoT) software and service.

The company plans to make available for royalty-free use its mature and tested device-to-cloud software technology, currently employed in home monitoring systems, solar energy and in retail applications. 

Panasonic will contribute its device-to-cloud software open source code to the OpenDOF Project, a non-profit entity Panasonic founded earlier this year to administer open source software contributed by Panasonic and the open source community. The organization will focus on expanding a secure, flexible and interoperable open source software framework to enable the development of scalable and reliable network services from a variety of components and systems including gateways and cloud services.

The OpenDOF framework will support different IoT networking technologies and new deployments as well as legacy systems. It will target services in two major areas: collecting data from devices such as sensors and remote control of devices. Panasonic will also contribute software code and experience to the Gateway Working Group of the AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry nonprofit open source consortium.

The announcement was made at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose, California where Panasonic will also announce plans to increase its intellectual property contributions to the AllSeen Alliance. Panasonic serves on the board of the AllSeen Alliance, which is dedicated to driving the adoption of products, systems and services that support IoT with an open, universal development framework. Panasonic is also a "Gold member" of The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux and collaborative software development, and which hosts the AllSeen Alliance as a Collaborative Project.