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Eclipse ThreadX: More Predictable; More Open

Last week, the Eclipse ThreadX project announced the release of ThreadX v6.4.3.202503. The version number may appear unusual at first glance; the new suffix simply designates this release as part of our Q3 2025 cycle. While this may seem like a minor adjustment, it represents a significant milestone for the project team. With this release, Eclipse ThreadX is transitioning to a quarterly release cadence, enabling us to deliver updates and improvements on a more predictable schedule. In keeping with our commitment to openness and transparency, we will also begin publishing and maintaining a public roadmap outlining our planned work. Read on for the complete details. Release Cadence Going forward, we will publish ThreadX and its companion components at the end of each quarter. To make it easier to track when a specific release is published, we will now add this information to the end of the version string. For example, at the time of writing, the latest ThreadX release was ThreadX 6.4.2. ...

From Local to Global: African Developers Take the IoT Leap

Over the past two years, I’ve had the privilege of expanding my open source developer advocacy to include countries in the Global South — Brazil last year, and Nigeria this year. What struck me during these trips is that a country lagging behind wealthier, industrialised economies doesn’t mean being left out of technological progress. Quite the opposite. Cutting-edge technologies are very much present. Yet, a closer look reveals a distinctive pattern: gaps in the usual technology adoption timeline. Take communications, for example — wireless networks are everywhere, and often far more reliable than wired infrastructure has ever been in those countries. The lesson is clear: as they advance, Global South countries don’t need to follow the same incremental path taken elsewhere. They can leapfrog transitional technologies and move straight to the most advanced solutions. This was the essence of my message to the audience at OSCAFest 2025 a few weeks ago. During the event, which took place...

2025 Embedded and IoT Developer Survey: 10th Time is the Charm

The 2025 edition of the Eclipse Embedded and IoT developer survey is now underway! Take the survey now – it only takes a few minutes. Your insights and opinions will help shape the future of Embedded and IoT systems. Let's make a difference together! Although our public archives only date back to 2019 , the Eclipse Foundation has been conducting this survey in one form or another since 2015. To my knowledge, it is the only one of its kind managed by an open source community. Your participation in this survey is not just a contribution, but a vital part of the open source community's growth. Moreover, all of our survey reports are made available under the CC BY 4.0 license , meaning that you can freely share and adapt them simply by giving appropriate credit. In other words, your participation in the survey benefits not just commercial interests, but the entire open source community. As usual, the survey will gather precious data on embedded microcontroller architectures, commu...

Eclipse ThreadX at Embedded World 2025 – Setting the Standard for Open Source Safety-Certified RTOSes

The embedded industry is at a pivotal moment: safety-critical systems are growing in complexity, and proprietary solutions are struggling to keep up with evolving regulatory requirements, and long-term sustainability concerns. Moreover, their cost impedes innovation in increasingly competitive markets that see margins under pressure at a time when organisations need to step up their technology investments. The Eclipse ThreadX RTOS is rewriting the rules — combining the power of open source with the rigorous safety certifications required for automotive, medical, industrial, and appliances. At Embedded World 2025, we will showcase how ThreadX is leading the way in redefining safety-certified embedded systems through open collaboration. Historically, companies developing safety-critical applications have faced a difficult choice — invest in costly proprietary RTOS solutions or attempt to navigate safety certification challenges alone. ThreadX eliminates this tradeoff. It is the first an...

Eclipse ThreadX: Charting our course for 2025

On November 21, 2023, Microsoft announced that it was contributing Azure RTOS to the Eclipse Foundation, which gave birth to the Eclipse ThreadX project . Since then, the project team and Eclipse Foundation staff have been working tirelessly behind the scenes to transition ThreadX to a true community-driven open source project and ensure its continued certification for safety-critical applications. In this short post, I will review the major milestones of that first year and share what to expect from the team in 2025. ThreadX v6.4.1 On February 28, 2024, the ThreadX project released version 6.4.1 of ThreadX and its companion modules. This release, the first made under the Eclipse Foundation development process, completed the transition of ThreadX to open source. From a technical standpoint, there were no changes from the prior 6.4.0 release. And yet, v6.4.1 represents a significant milestone. The Eclipse Foundation intends to certify ThreadX v6.4.1 for safety-critical applications. Yo...

A Few Embedded and IoT Sessions Worth Your Time at OCX 2024

2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the Eclipse Foundation . It also represents a brand-new start for our annual flagship conference. Its new name, Open Community Experience (OCX), emphasises our community's place in the broader open source ecosystem. The event will take place in Mainz, Germany, on October 22-24, 2024. OCX, as EclipseCon before, features several distinct tracks. One of them is dedicated to Embedded, IoT, and Edge Computing topics. If you look at the conference’s agenda , you will find them by activating the “OCX Tracks” filter. Click this link to access a pre-filtered version of the agenda. Not sure about which sessions to catch? See below the top five sessions I hope to attend. Of course, there are many other great ones, so please browse the full agenda. * How IoT can save a life - A real-world example October 23, 2024 11:30 AM-12:15 PM CET I love talks that showcase concretely how technology can make the world better. IoT devices, after all, embed software in ev...

Three Embedded and Iot Topics I Expect to See at Open Community Experience 2024

As the Eclipse Foundation celebrates its 20th anniversary, its annual developer conference is reborn under a new name: Open Community Experience (OCX). With the new name come a new city (Mainz, Germany), and a fresh new concept for the event. One thing that does not change is the focus on the various developer communities that make the broader Eclipse ecosystem. Naturally, Java and Software Defined Vehicle (SDV) will have a prominent place. That’s why they get their own co-located events in Open Community for Java and Open Community for Automotive . But the organisers remembered the embedded and IoT community. We are getting our own track inside the main OCX event! Here are three Embedded and IoT topics I expect (and hope) will take a lot of place in the track’s program: 1. Sparkplug and the Unified Namespace (UNS) Since it became an international standard in 2023, Sparkplug continued to advance. Our recent white paper on the business value of Sparkplug shows how this Eclipse open ...

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 ...

Sparkplug Recognized a Leader of Edge Computing

I am delighted today to announce that Sparkplug won an IoT Edge Computing Excellence Award from IoT Evolution ! This achievement underscores the growing maturity of the specification and its relevance to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) market. Congratulations to the committers and contributors of the Sparkplug specification project! From the announcement:  This award recognizes the companies emerging as leaders in the growing edge computing space. Companies selected for this award have proven that their products are enabling advanced IoT deployments by offering edge solutions that bring real-time computing, data availability, analytics, AI and machine learning to edge devices. Edge Nodes play a fundamental role in Sparkplug. Version 3.0 of the specification defines them as any MQTT Client application that manages an MQTT Session and provides the physical or logical gateway functions required to participate in the Sparkplug topic namespace and leverage its payload definit...

Two Easy Things You Can Do to Support the Open Source IoT and Edge Community

Most of what we do at the Eclipse Foundation happens in public. Our mailing lists and code repositories are open to all. Anyone can freely download, modify, and redistribute our code and slide decks with little to no strings attached. This kind of openness is the mark of truly successful ecosystems. However, one persistent problem for our open source committers and contributors is the lack of information about who uses the code they write and for what purpose. This lack of information is a significant disadvantage from a product and project management perspective. It is easier to prioritize new features or bug fixes when you know who uses your code and for what purpose. Moreover, our committers and contributors are keen to engage with their user community to discuss their roadmap and solicit feedback. While this is a persistent and hard-to-solve problem, there are two easy things you can do to help. Both will require only a few minutes of your time. The first is to show your support fo...

Eclipse Amlen v1.0: A Milestone in the Growth of MQTT

Over ten years ago, the Eclipse Foundation launched the Eclipse IoT working group . MQTT was one of the pillars of that launch. The first three projects were Eclipse Paho , a collection of MQTT clients, Eclipse Mosquitto , an MQTT broker, and Eclipse Kura , a Java/OSGi solution for IoT gateways that supports the protocol. To say that MQTT is in our genes would be an understatement. Since then, usage of MQTT has grown significantly. Year after year, the simple yet powerful publish/subscribe protocol is the most widely used IoT-specific protocol in our annual developer surveys . For example, in the 2021 edition, 44% of respondents stated they are using it. We like to think we are at least partly responsible for that. By the way, our 2022 survey is currently underway; you have until June 15, 2022, to participate. Click here to share your insights after finishing this post, of course. IBM has been a key player in our MQTT ecosystem for a long time. In 2021, the company brought its commit...

The Edge of Things: A Name That Means a Lot of Things

I have a fantastic job. When people ask what I do, I say I manage IoT and Edge Computing programs at the Eclipse Foundation. This is true yet is an oversimplification. What I actually do is a bit more complicated than that. I need to keep an eye on over fifty relevant Eclipse open-source projects. At the same time, I help animate three distinct communities: the Eclipse IoT , Edge Native , and Sparkplug working groups. All three have something to do with IoT and Edge Computing, each with a slightly different angle. And here is my problem: it is hard to convey all the nuances of everything our IoT and Edge community does in a single word. IoT, of course, includes Edge Computing. Deploying compute, storage, and networking resources as close to the source of the data as possible makes complete sense. However, Edge Computing is an architecture that applies to many other use cases, such as gaming or videoconferencing. None of those two concepts completely encloses the other. And no sing...

IoT and Edge in 2022: Looking Back & Looking Forward

At last, 2022 is with us. In my native Canada, the month of January usually brings polar temperatures — think -25 Celcius (-13 Fahrenheit) and below. When it is so cold outside, it is a good time to think about the past year and look forward to the year ahead. In that sense, January is the perfect name for the month. You see, the month of January is named for the Roman god Janus. Janus is the god of beginnings, time, and transitions in ancient Roman religion. He is represented as having two faces; he could see the past with one and the future with the other. In this post, I will consider both the past and future of the Eclipse IoT and Edge ecosystem. 2021 was great! When I look behind, 2021 has been a banner year for us. Our celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the Eclipse IoT working group at EclipseCon has been a wonderful moment, and our community is stronger than ever. Moreover, the 2021 edition of the Eclipse IoT and Edge developer survey report has made quite an impact. Since...

Eclipse IoT: The Next Ten Years

If you attended EclipseCon 2021 , you probably heard about the 10th anniversary of the Eclipse IoT Working Group . Throughout the end of 2021 and into 2022, we will celebrate this significant milestone together.  Our first step to commemorate the occasion has been to organize a panel regrouping five early contributors to the working group : Benjamin Cabé, Marco Carrer, Andy Piper, Ian Skerrett, and Andy Stanford-Clark. During the conversation, they reminisced about the early days and shared their vision of the future. I acted as the panel's moderator, and I must say I have been impressed by the insights shared by our pioneers.  I want to share what I think the next ten years will have in store for the Eclipse IoT working group in this blog post. 1. Edge Computing Will Be an Integral Part of IoT Optimizing power consumption, reducing latency, keeping bandwidth usage under control... There are many reasons to leverage edge computing in IoT deployments. As 5G coverage grows and ...

Three Things I Hope to Learn From the 2021 Eclipse IoT and Edge Developer Survey

The 2021 edition of the Eclipse IoT & Edge Developer Survey is underway. This is the seventh edition of the survey, which over the years has become one of the most widely referenced technical surveys within the IoT & edge computing community. Back in July, strategic members of the Eclipse IoT, Edge Native and Sparkplug working groups were overhauling the survey. As a result, I sincerely think this is our best survey yet, and I am excited about our upcoming report on the results, which we intend to publish in November. As usual, the survey results will be chock-full of insights. Here are three questions to which I look forward to seeing answers. How are developers leveraging edge gateways and edge servers? In past editions of the survey, we have asked developers which languages they use and which workloads they deploy on edge nodes. This year, we made this question more granular as we split edge nodes into edge gateways and edge servers. What is the distinction, you ask? An ed...

[Guest Post] Edge Computing and Open Source in Europe: A New Hope

This is a guest post by Alberto P. Martí, VP of Open Source Community Relations at OpenNebula . For everyone in the European cloud market with a passion for open source, these are exciting times. For years, tech journalists and market analysts have been predicting that edge computing was going to bring a paradigm shift to the cloud, and now we are starting to see the form that this disruption is going to take—at least in Europe. Technically speaking, there is little doubt that deploying applications and processing data at the edge comes with a number of benefits, and not only in terms of reducing latency and improving user experience. We are talking about expanding service availability to better deal with infrastructure incidents, reducing data transfers and the energy consumption and security risks associated with them, as well as minimizing vendor dependency by expanding the number of available providers. It comes as no surprise that the European Union has identified edge computing a...

Member Case Study: Aloxy Leverages Eclipse Foundation Membership to Build its Petro-Chemical Business

At the Eclipse Foundation, we’ve seen companies from all around the world, from different industries, find value in open source software. Aloxy, the subject of our latest member case study , has discovered that adopting open source components helped them focus on the unique aspects of their products, and increase their time to market. “Our customers like the idea that we’re not reinventing all of the technologies ourselves, and that we’re using and participating in open source projects that are governed by a well-known, independent foundation,” said Glenn Ergeerts, Aloxy’s co-founder and chief technology officer. Aloxy is an Industrial IoT firm based in Antwerp (Belgium) that primarily works with clients in the petrochemical industry. The company creates infrastructure sensors that monitor the positions of critical valves and send the data back to the Aloxy IIoT Hub for processing and analysis. To build their solutions, Aloxy has adopted two Eclipse IoT projects, Eclipse Hono and Ecli...

A Shared Vision For Edge Computing

The Eclipse Foundation is a member-driven, vendor-neutral organization. I cannot count the number of times I have said this since I started at the Foundation in February of 2019. As a Foundation staffer, my job is to serve the community and assist its members in driving their initiatives. During the past 12 months or so, I have had the privilege to work closely with our Edge Native Working Group on what I consider to be a very special initiative. After its creation in December 2019, one of the main goals of the Edge Native Working Group has been to define its vision for Edge Computing and share it with the rest of the industry. The community decided at that time to write a comprehensive white paper to accomplish this goal. At first, I simply supported that effort, but ended up writing part of it. Today marks the launch of our white paper, titled “ From DevOps to EdgeOps: A Vision for Edge Computing ”. And I am proud to say that my vision for Edge Computing is, in fact, a vision shared...

Use Your IoT and Edge Knowledge for Good!

There is nothing worse than working in the dark. Even a task seemingly as simple as plugging a cable can be an exercise in frustration without the proper lighting. The same applies if you are working to deliver IoT and Edge Computing solutions. Without knowledge of market trends, you are working in the dark. Do I target the right market? Do I deliver features that developers and operators want? If all you have is your own knowledge, answering those questions can be difficult. Fortunately, we are here to help! One of the missions of the Eclipse Foundation is to identify market trends in order to help our members and the broader open source community meet business and industry needs. To that end, we have been running our annual IoT Developer Survey since 2015 and our Commercial IoT Adoption survey since 2019. You now have the opportunity to share your knowledge of IoT and Edge Computing by participating in our 2021 IoT and Edge Commercial Adoption Survey. Make your voice heard while br...

2021 Open Source Crystal Ball: What I See For IoT and Edge Computing

As Edge Computing architectures and the Internet of Things (IoT) continue to grow throughout multiple vertical markets, one trend that enterprises have made abundantly clear is that, in 2021, they expect their edge computing solutions and IoT technologies to be based on or leverage open source. This was confirmed in the most recent Eclipse IoT Commercial Adoption survey published in March 2020, which found that 60% of the organizations surveyed are factoring open source into their deployment plans.  There are many reasons for this growing demand for open source. One significant factor is that  businesses want to tailor information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) builds to meet their specific requirements. This is best accomplished with solutions based on an open source model. In other words: while businesses certainly appreciate the cost and time savings open source offers, what they truly want and need is the control and flexibility it affords. Perhaps predict...