Sorry to interrupt the newsfeed, but there's currently an issue that we open source Zigbee developers are trying to address.  There was a challenge to the Zigbee specification's compatibility with the GPL recently that centers on the requirement for commercial projects to join the Zigbee Alliance before they sell any products that use the Zigbee IP. Although I'm not really impacted by this (since I'm a member), if anyone wants to use my source code and sell their product, even if they freely open their own source code, they will not be able to unless they pay the $3500 Zigbee membership fee. At even greater issue, is that this problem may prevent the Zigbee-Linux development effort from being integrated into the kernel. For a more detailed description of the problem, please check this link. 

This issue has already been brought up in the Zigbee Alliance via the internal mailing list. However I suspect that it might not be enough to sway the people in charge. Rectifying the problem would eventually come down to a vote by the Zigbee Alliance board of directors, most of whom are made up of representatives of for-profit companies. Most of these representatives are executive level management as well. From my past days in the corporate world, I know that most executives of for-profit companies comprehend two things quite well: numbers and money. Since I don't have much money, very little to be exact, I thought I would give the numbers side a shot. 

This blog has a decent amount of visitors. Although I won't get into exact numbers, according to the website stats, it's over a thousand per day. I would say a very high percentage of them are somehow affiliated with the wireless sensor network and more specifically, Zigbee industry. So I would like to ask that if you could take a few seconds of your time, please take a look at the following poll. The questions are actually very simple and pretty obvious, which is actually the point. The benefits of having Zigbee integrated into Linux should also be very obvious. 

And if you have more than a few seconds, could you please leave a comment regarding how you feel about open source Zigbee and Zigbee being integrated into Linux? Whether for or against, I'm sure that the Zigbee-Linux developers as well as the Zigbee Alliance would be very interested to hear what you have to say. As always, you don't need to register to post a comment. You can use whatever strange name you can think of.

Thank you very much. Please click the "Read More" link to find the polls.

Note: You need to click the "Vote" button after each selection. This is actually three separate polls on PollDaddy that I aggregated into this page. I've also enabled the PollDaddy feature to prevent  the same user from entering multiple votes.

Question 1:

Question 2:

Question 3:

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (6)

Subscribe to this comment's feed

...
written by Akiba, June 16, 2009

Yay! I'm the first voter.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

...
written by Arasch Honarbacht, June 16, 2009

In a recent project we added coordinator features to an embedded Linux platform (based on AT91SAM9 series) with Ethernet interface and SNMP. We added a USB to ZigBee dongle to one of the two host USB ports to make the platform function as coordinator. If a native ZigBee implementation for Linux would have been readily available, this would have reduced development costs and time-to-market for our customer a lot.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +2

We need it !
written by Shaiton, June 16, 2009

As Arasch Honarbacht, it would have been cheaper and faster to use kernel zigbee support to use Zigbee.
In fact I had a project using a usb dongle as coordinator. Our library become quite heavy now.

I think that adding Zigbee support will really increase new customers.
I would like to share a crazy link :

http://www.crazyengineers.com/dr-michael-mike-foley-bluetooth-30-sig-beyond/
"With the arrival of Bluetooth 3.0 the world will never be the same." ...

I strongly disagree with that, but I share it because it can be useful.

Thanks

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

...
written by Sam, June 17, 2009

Same situation as above, we're trying to integrate ZigBee into an embedded linux platform, and having to use USB keys. It should be supported in the stack. It would hasten adoptions, Linux isn't just open-source hobbies, its heavily used in the embedded system and control world, which I assume ZigBee would like to be part of.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

...
written by Edmund, June 17, 2009

[Akiba] Moved from discussion forums to main comment section[/Akiba]

We are in the process of developing a mobile device by adding some Wireless technologies to a baseboard. We mainly use a fat broadcast pipe to get content to the devices (DVB-T), but would love to use Zigbee as a backchannel. WLAN is out of question because of radio management problems.
We do have several hundred devices in the same area. The device would run Linux. So having Zigbee native in the Linux stack would be really an enabler for us.

yours
http://www.onsitebroadcast.at

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

...
written by Maxim Osipov, June 19, 2009

Thanks for the poll! It is nice to know, that what we've done is appreciated. Regarding benefits of native Linux ZigBee stack - you cannot use it for sensors, but for gateways and similar devices it will provide:
- reduced BOM for products
- no vendor lock-in
- possibility to support multiple ieee802.15.4 based protocols within one solution
- well-known socket programming interface
- standard GNU development tools
- easy access to network analysis tools, like wireshark

BTW, generic parts of our ieee802.15.4 implementation already propagated to Linus tree

report abuse

vote down

vote up

Votes: +0

Show/Hide comment form

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Subscribe via email (Registered users only)

I have read and agree to the Terms of Usage.

Add Comment