The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development, announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance, the broadest cross-industry consortium to date to advance adoption and innovation in the “Internet of Everything” in homes and industry. The AllSeen Alliance becomes the 11th Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.

The AllSeen Alliance is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to driving the widespread adoption of products, systems and services that support the Internet of Everything with an open, universal development framework that is supported by a vibrant ecosystem and thriving technical community. The AllSeen Alliance looks to expand upon the “Internet of Things,” which Gartner predicts will add $1.9 trillion to the global economy by 2020, to include more functionality and interactions across various brands and sectors, such as the connected home, healthcare, education, automotive and enterprise.

Founding members of the AllSeen Alliance include some of the world’s leading consumer electronics manufacturers, home appliances manufacturers, service providers, retailers, enterprise technology companies, startups, and chipset manufacturers. Premier level members include Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Sharp, Silicon Image and TP-LINK. Community members include Canary, Cisco, D-Link, doubleTwist, Fon, Harman, HTC, Letv, LIFX, Lite-on, Moxtreme, Musaic, Sears, Sproutling, The Sprosty Network, Weaved and Wilocity.

As no single company can accomplish the level of interoperability required to support the Internet of Everything and address everyday, real-life scenarios, a united, pan-industry effort is needed to deliver new experiences to consumers and businesses. The members of the AllSeen Alliance will contribute software and engineering resources as part of their collaboration on an open software framework that enables hardware manufacturers, service providers and software developers to create interoperable devices and services. This open source framework allows ad hoc systems to seamlessly discover, dynamically connect and interact with nearby products regardless of brand, transport layer, platform or operating system.

The initial framework is based on the AllJoyn open source project, which was originally developed by and is being contributed to the Alliance by Qualcomm, and will be expanded with contributions from member companies and the open source community. AllJoyn was created as an open source project by Qualcomm Innovation Center and was previously distributed under the Apache 2.0 open source license (but with certain portions distributed under a BSD license) up through the formation of the AllSeen Alliance in December 2013.

AllJoyn is transport-, OS-, platform- and brand-agnostic. Products, applications and services created with the AllJoyn open source project can communicate over various transport layers, such as Wi-Fi, power line or Ethernet, regardless of manufacturer or operating system and without the need for Internet access. The software runs on popular platforms such as Linux and the Linux-based Android, iOS, and Windows, including embedded variants.

A major barrier to realizing the full promise of the Internet of Everything is the absence of a unified community and universal framework that prioritizes intelligent interoperability across electronic devices and systems regardless of transport layer, platform, OS or brand. “Solutions” for connecting devices today are characterized by proprietary approaches that have created multiple silos, resulting in highly capable devices and systems that don’t work together.

AllJoyn is designed to address complex problems that exist in enabling peer-to-peer and IoE applications such as discovery, message routing, security, interoperability, etc. and simplifies how devices interact with one another creating a much better user experience. The intention is to provide a tool to enable developers to build ad-hoc, interoperable applications and services without having to solve these problems themselves. This allows developers and OEMs to focus on the core functionality that is their applications. AllJoyn is an enabler for applications like control applications, multiplayer games, photos sharing, real time multi-player orchestra, etc.

The framework consists of a code base of various modular Services that enable fundamental activities such as discovery of adjacent devices, pairing, message routing and security. The cross platform nature of the open source codebase ensures interoperability among even the most basic devices and systems.

As an example, a smart lock built with the framework would seamlessly connect to smart lights that also use the framework and security cameras from other manufacturers, thus enabling unauthorized entries to trigger the lights to flash and the camera to take a photo of the intruder and broadcast a notification and picture. Factory floors can benefit from the framework’s ability to enable a self-aware network that can constantly learn what new equipment has been added and what capabilities or interfaces that equipment has so that it can immediately begin playing its part in the manufacturing process.

The initial set of capabilities planned for the codebase include: device discovery to exchange information and configurations (learning about other nearby devices); onboarding to join the user’s network of connected devices; user notifications; a common control panel for creating rich user experiences; and audio streaming for simultaneous playback on multiple speakers. As the TSC approves Working Groups and members contribute new Services, these capabilities and features are expected to expand.