I've been a fan of open source software (OSS) for some time now. But ask anyone who's worked with older systems in hardware, and they'll probably tell you the interface was written in proprietary software. My main complaint with proprietary software -- and a common one, I'm sure -- is that it often feels uninspired and sometimes sluggish or dated. It's almost as if more effort is spent on marketing and licensing efforts. And that makes sense; if a customer has locked in a license, there's not a lot to incentivize a company to rapidly develop and release new software.
Not so with the case emerging with IoT, which is seeing an increasing number of OSS stacks, writes readwrite. Compared to proprietary software, OSS is more flexible in terms of end user control, and tend to offer more rapid updates, usually improves quality quickly. From the article:
[W]hile open source will remain a big deal to IoT developers even as the space commercializes, we’re likely to see it embraced more for its quality than for its ideology over time.
What's interesting is the analog between IoT hardware and software -- circuits and fixtures are prototyped from individual components the same way the code base is connected together from various OSS projects. In both cases, the result maximizes control and flexibility. Hopefully the OSS trend in IoT continues.