Panasonic will provide royalty-free access to software, patents and experience from its product ecosystem to speed the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) software and services. The announcement was made at the Embedded Linux Conference in San Jose, Calif. Panasonic also plans to increase its intellectual property contributions to the AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry nonprofit open source consortium.

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

"Open sourcing a proprietary technology invites the open source community to evaluate, work on and ultimately improve the software. In a market full of incompatible, proprietary offerings, this initiative brings a powerful tool to developers and equipment makers to help them create what the market wants in the IoT: interoperable and flexible services and applications leveraging data from connected devices and most importantly value to the customer," said Panasonic Corporation of North American Chief Technology Officer Todd Rytting.

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 that is supported by a technical community. Panasonic is 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.

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