UBOS featured in Linux Journal

In their February issue, Linux Journal has a long interview on UBOS with Johannes Ernst.

You’re the Boss with UBOS

The interview was conducted by Doc Searls who, other than being a Senior Editor there, is one of the original authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, recently updated.

Here are some choice quotes:

DS: making it easy for muggles to set up their own fully independent personal home servers with little or no help from wizards.

DS: What's the end state of the "Internet of our own things"? Or at least a state to which Linux Journal readers can aspire—and weigh in with some code and product?

JE: As geeks, and as an industry, we have a choice to make here about how we'd like the Internet of Things to look ten years from now.

There's the "NEST way", which is totally closed devices 100% dependent on being tethered to some corporate overlord. Google in this case. Some people consider these beautiful-looking devices to be nothing else than surveillance devices first and thermostats second. I guess they have a point. In any case, we have no control whatsoever over their functioning and terms of service, nor what they do with our data.

And there's the user-owned, free/libre, "indie" way, where every device is—at least in principle—hackable. Where data stays home, or at least is only shared with anybody because the owner of the device decided that that is what they wanted to do. Where we can run the code we want on whatever device we buy or build. Where interoperability is not subject to whether some big companies love or hate each other this week.

Personally, I'm horrified at the first of these scenarios, and I know many other geeks are too, because all these great IoT projects keep popping up everywhere. The next step is to make this all reliable and maintainable enough that it's not just the geeks who can control their own homes. UBOS is one step in that direction, but many others are required. In fact, we might need a real barn-raising effort to together create an "Internet of our own things". Anybody up for that? I am!

LJ: Us too.

Since this interview was conducted, we’ve started calling these two architectures the “Indie IoT” vs. “Overlord IoT” architectures.