Debian and the Internet of Things

Everybody is talking about the Internet of Things. Unfortunately there is no sign of it in Debian yet. Besides some smaller packages like sispmctl, usbrelay or the 1-wire support in digitemp and owfs, there is not much software to control devices over a network.

With the recent upload of alljoyn-core-1504 this might change.

The Alljoyn Framework, where the Alljoyn Core is just one of several modules, lets devices and applications detect each other and communicate with one another over a D-Bus like message bus. The development of the framework has been started by Qualcomm some years ago and is meanwhile managed by the AllSeen Alliance, a nonprofit consortium. The software is licensed under the ISC license.

This first upload is just the first step of a long journey. Other modules that compose the framework and already have a released tarball are related to lightning products, gateways to overcome the boundaries of the local network and much more. In the near future it is also planned to have modules that attach Z-Wave-, ZigBee- or Bluetooth-devices to the Alljoyn bus.

So all in all, this looks like an exciting task and everybody is invited to help maintaining the software in Debian.