Open Source Hobbyists Now In High Demand

You know what? They're not calling us "hobbyists" anymore. It struck me this morning when I was reading up about this cool little open source operating system called Contiki, a very lightweight embedded OS designed to work well with the Internet of Things.

My colleague Rohan Pearce has a great write-up about Contiki over on Techworld Australia, detailing what Contiki and the Internet of Things are and how they work. But the passage that struck me was this one: "In 2008, networking vendor Cisco contributed code to add IPv6 support to the OS, making it the first IPv6 certified system for the Internet of Things"

On the surface, not such a big deal, I suppose. But then I thought about it some more: four years ago, Cisco came along and thought there was enough potential in this open source project to just toss in the code to prep Contiki for IPv6. (This, by the way, is exactly the kind of thing Contiki needs, since the sheer number of hardware devices getting connected to the Internet is why IPv6 is being deployed.)...