Panasonic opens up patent free-for-all to trigger IoT growth

Panasonic has made a big step towards spurring development in the Internet of Things (IoT) sector by making 50 patents royalty free.

The company wants to improve development in the area by making open source code easily available for its mature and tested device-to-cloud software technology, which is already used in home monitoring systems, solar energy and other retail applications.

"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's North American CTO Todd Rytting.

Panasonic plans to make the open source code available through the OpenDOF Project, which it started to share open source software that will help to develop a secure framework for IoT technologies. It has also increased its intellectual property contributions to the AllSeen Alliance.

Not the only step it's taking

Panasonic isn't the first company to start offering its patents up free of charge after Toyota made over 5,000 of its fuel cell patents available royalty free in January.

The company has been gathering pace when it comes to the IoT. Earlier this year at MWC 2015, Panasonic announced it would be launch its own MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) service to allow businesses devices to connect to the M2M (machine-to-machine) cloud.

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