P2P Foundation

Scholten started the project about a year ago to help bring collaboration and innovation to the building automation industry, which he says is “limited by the small number of gateway technologies available and [has] no common development platform to the next level.” The building automation industry, controlled by large companies like Siemens, Johnson Controls and Honeywell, has created automation technologies that work well on their own but largely live in silos (each one is based on a different non-compatible platform) and for the most part, don’t rely on the common language of Internet Protocol. Scholten says the next step for the building automation industry is to take a cue from the IT industry and develop open-source projects like Asterisk (an open-source version of a standard telephone network).

Peter Michalek, who has been working on OpenLynx for a few months, pointed out in the talk on Monday that open source can bring down the costs of the energy management systems dramatically and can make them more advanced, because they will be built on already-established basics. He said the licensing agreement of OpenLynx is “liberal,” explaining that a developer can do anything s/he wants with it, but has to publish the benefits created back into the system. Karsten Wade, the self-described community gardener for Red Hat’s open-source community, who also sat on the roundtable, says the benefits of open source include reducing the total cost of ownership and enabling user-driven innovation.