ARM hasn’t been paying attention. While the rest of the world has turned to open source for essential infrastructure software, ARM’s Mbed operating system for the Internet of things (IoT) is proprietary, with just enough open source sprinkled in to attract developers.
ARM insists this is necessary to prevent Mbed from becoming fragmented, which is a reasonable concern. What may not be reasonsable, however, is relying on a proprietary operating system to dominate IoT.
Open source: Essential to IoT developers
While most focus on nodes as the big deal in IoT (26 billion devices by 2020, according to Gartner), the more important number is the total number of IoT developers. Today there are an estimated 300,000 IoT developers, with 70,000 developers working on Mbed, according to ARM.
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