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Showing posts from November, 2023

Sparkplug: From Specification to Standard

This week, the Eclipse Foundation announced that the Sparkpug® 3.0 specification has been published as an International Standard. That sounds impressive. But what does it mean, exactly? And how will this impact the evolution of Sparkplug? To answer this question, let’s take a step back and consider what standards are. The technology industry loves standards. For example, USB is a set of standards managed by the USB Implementers Forum, Inc. (USB-IF), a non-profit corporation founded by the companies that developed the USB specification. The Eclipse Foundation describes Jakarta EE as a standard: a set of  specifications for enterprise Java application development. In the IoT and Industrial Automation world, OASIS Open also presents the MQTT protocol as a standard. However, standards play a much more pervasive role in society. There are standards for building homes and others that define how cars should work. Standards permeate our lives. To understand the significance of this ...