Following the recent announcement of a merger with the AllSeen Alliance, the number of member companies has grown to 310.
Expanding application across various fields based on the IoT standard platform 'IoTivity'

With the trend toward the unification of IoT standardization organizations, the open source initiatives promoted by these groups are expected to spread rapidly.

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), an Internet of Things standardization organization, announced on the 10th that it is merging with the AllSeen Alliance, an IoT consortium that was a kind of rival organization.

Until now, the general view in the IoT industry was that the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC), the predecessor of OCF, was a camp centered on Samsung Electronics and Intel, while AllSeen was an IoT camp centered on LG Electronics and Qualcomm. However, the situation has changed rapidly recently as OCF merged with AllSeen and major home appliance manufacturers like LG Electronics joined as board members. This has resulted in the birth of the most representative consortium for creating international standards related to IoT (with 310 member companies as of October 13).



In fact, unified standards in the field of the Internet of Things are welcome news for consumers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is because consumers want unconditional device connectivity, and SMEs with limited software development capabilities want to quickly manufacture products and enter the market. Open source has been regarded as the core of the IoT industry, given that unified standards are necessary to ensure interoperability between devices.

Accordingly, OCF currently adopts a unique approach of providing both open source and standards. The reason OCF (formerly OIC), which initially advocated solely for open source development, began creating and distributing standards is to provide developers with broader development opportunities and support interoperability verification. OCF, which announced the open source project 'IoTivity' at CES earlier this year, operates in a way that allows all essential features created within its own specifications to be included. This enables not only large corporations but also small businesses to easily build IoT products and conduct interoperability tests.

The reason OCF did not directly manage the IoTivity project under its umbrella but instead had the Linux Foundation operate it exclusively is also for the sake of the developer ecosystem. By leveraging the familiar brand of Linux rather than the unfamiliar organization of OCF, they enabled the development of IoT technology and the growth of the ecosystem.

One of the factors behind the expansion of open source is that its quality has risen to a significantly high level. In the past, companies chose to develop in-house rather than modify and improve low-quality open source software, as it was more cost-effective. However, the situation has changed. Even when massive resources are invested, the quality often falls short of that of open source. Furthermore, the pace of open source development has become so rapid that it is difficult for companies to keep up. As long as there are no licensing issues, there is no reason not to use open source. Industry insiders unanimously agree that "the adoption of open source has gained tremendous momentum and this will not easily change."

For example, Samsung Electronics’ Tizen platform, currently applied to TVs and refrigerators, is also 80–85% built entirely from open source. Only about 15% of the source code was developed in-house by Samsung. This implies that any company capable of creating that 15% of software can produce a product similar to Tizen.

The AllSeen consortium's sudden joining of OCF was driven not only by the technical background that OCF's adopted RESTful architecture is highly efficient for bus structures in IoT scenarios, but also by the significant impact of its royalty-free IP policy. The entry of Qualcomm, which led AllSeen, into OCF was interpreted as a clear agreement with OCF's royalty-free policy.

Park Soo-hong, a senior executive at Samsung Electronics, spoke at the International Internet of Things Conference on the 13th, stating, “If Korean companies want to seize business opportunities through the OCF, they need to actively utilize open source. This is because we believe that open source will become the standard for IoT.” He added, “Up until the current IoTivity 1.0 version, we have had many contacts regarding the smart home sector, but we expect to expand into various fields of interest in the future.”

OCF is expanding its services in healthcare, where ETRI is excelling, as well as in oneM2M connectivity, smart homes and cloud computing, and automotive and logistics.

Furthermore, Senior Manager Park stated, “I believe the key to OCF success going forward lies in how quickly we can bring products to market and make them available for use.” "To this end, OCF is working with various partners and collaborating with other IoT organizations," he said.