Towards Open Collaboration: The Linux Foundation and IOTA Foundation join forces through LF Edge

At the IOTA Foundation, we’ve always done things a bit differently. Many like to think that while our industry mostly took a left, we instead took a hard right. Embracing new architectures, rapid development, rapid research, and an internal focus on figuring out how to do things in a way that scaled with some prominent core principles.

1. No one should ever have to pay a fee for infrastructure, so we will always remain fee-free.
2. No one should have to send value to send data. So we will always have a two-pronged approach. Any person, organization or device can either send data OR send value, but they don’t have to do them together.
3. Solutions should be able to scale towards global standards, because if the solutions we’re building already have barriers stopping them from scaling to impact everyone and everything, then we’re already thinking too small. So every solution we design, already starts with the mindset that this needs to be geared for impact socially, economically, and industrially.
4. Data and value need to move fast. It doesn’t make sense for it to take over an hour to validate data if it’s something that’s highly critical.

One of the most enticing things about Blockchain, or in our instance Distributed Ledger Technology, is its premise of breaking barriers, embracing collaboration, crossing borders and doing things functionally. We at the IOTA Foundation have spent the last 2 years with an inward focus to learn and develop our core protocol in a way that works and solves real problems. We take the premise of Blockchain very much to heart and we’re starting to progress toward showing that side of ourselves more visibly.

Earlier this year we announced that we were going be increasing our presence and push throughout North America. Today we’d like to announce a good first step towards doing that externally.  

The Linux Foundation has long been a leader in the Open Source community. It has one of the strongest instances of embracing Open Collaboration, building multi-stakeholder solutions and has been a great service and platform to the technology industry as a whole. Through the request of many discussions we’ve had with industry leaders, it has become evident that theLF Edgeframework is just another instance of the Linux Foundation doing what it does best.

“We’re excited to be integrating more closely with the IOTA Foundation and are eager to further open innovation and leveraging the unique capabilities that IOTA brings to the LF Edge table,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “Collaboration with IOTA Foundation is another example of the power of collaboration in the open source community and the ways in which our communities can grow stronger together.”

“We’re excited to be integrating more closely with the IOTA Foundation and are eager to further open innovation and leveraging the unique capabilities that IOTA brings to the LF Edge table,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager, Networking, Edge, and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “Collaboration with IOTA Foundation is another example of the power of collaboration in the open source community and the ways in which our communities can grow stronger together.”

The LF Edge framework has been embraced as the leading open-source stack for IoT, Edge, and Cloud interoperability, but there has been a key piece of this puzzle missing. Distributed Ledger Technologies. We’re happy to announce that our first step Towards Open Collaborationis that we have joined the Linux Foundation to help complete their stack of technologies to advance their development of a truly interoperable solution set for IoT, Edge and Cloud integration.  

LF Edge is an umbrella organization that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. By bringing together industry leaders, LF Edge will create a common framework for hardware and software standards and best practices critical to sustaining current and future generations of IoT and edge devices. LF Edge fosters collaboration and innovation across the multiple industries including industrial manufacturing, cities and government, energy, transportation, retail, home and building automation, automotive, logistics and health care — all of which stand to be transformed by edge computing.

LF Edge is an umbrella organization that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system. By bringing together industry leaders, LF Edge will create a common framework for hardware and software standards and best practices critical to sustaining current and future generations of IoT and edge devices. LF Edge fosters collaboration and innovation across the multiple industries including industrial manufacturing, cities and government, energy, transportation, retail, home and building automation, automotive, logistics and health care — all of which stand to be transformed by edge computing.

Initially, our primary focus will be on integration into EdgeX Foundry, where we’ll be working with other members to show the power of the IOTA protocol towards securing, scaling, and allowing for increased interoperability in the Edge and Fog area of the stack.

EdgeX Foundry is focused on the Industrial IoT Edge. EdgeX Foundry leverages cloud-native principles (e.g. loosely-coupled microservices, platform-independence) but is architected to meet specific needs of the IoT edge including accommodating both IP- and non-IP based connectivity protocols, security and system management for widely distributed compute nodes, and scaling down to highly-constrained devices.

EdgeX Foundry is focused on the Industrial IoT Edge. EdgeX Foundry leverages cloud-native principles (e.g. loosely-coupled microservices, platform-independence) but is architected to meet specific needs of the IoT edge including accommodating both IP- and non-IP based connectivity protocols, security and system management for widely distributed compute nodes, and scaling down to highly-constrained devices.

Another example of decentralized technologies in the LF Edge stack is Hyperledger. Hyperledger and their community have done an excellent job developing data capabilities in a permissioned context. Now, we’re looking forward to bridging these permissioned data capabilities that Hyperledger offers with the permissionless data capabilities that are unique to the IOTA protocol. The IOTA Foundation has been quietly working towards a Hyperledger bridge for some time. While these are not solutions that are developed overnight, we’re excited to begin migrating what we’ve learned through that development with the capabilities of the Hyperledger ecosystem in the future to enable integrations into multiple Hyperledger frameworks as we progress. We aim for it to be one of the first open-source contributions we make to the LF Edge stack to allow for this interoperability and data sharing capability for both permissioned and permissionless use cases moving forward.  

We’re excited to move Towards Open Collaboration with the Linux Foundation, LF Edge, EdgeX Foundry and the Hyperledger ecosystems moving forward. This is our first step, but it’s not our only or last step. Keep an eye out in the near future for more details on what will be coming of this collaboration, and other steps Towards Open Collaboration in the near future.  

For more information on the IOTA protocol and what’s coming around the bend please subscribe to the official IOTA Foundation Blog, YouTube and Twitter. You can also sign up for the official IOTA Foundation Newsletter and if you want to engage directly with IOTA, join our official Discord server or email us at [email protected].