The prpl Foundation
Making Connections
Mirko Lindner of the prpl Foundation discusses how vendors and chipset makers are coming together to make IoT more interoperable and secure.
The prpl Foundation [1] is a non-profit consortium of hardware vendors, software vendors, service providers and developers. It describes itself as an open source, community-driven organization whose members [2] collaborate to develop standards and software to enable security and interoperability of embedded devices. We talk with the group's recently appointed Program Director, Mirko Lindner, to better understand the objectives of the foundation and how they'll impact end users like us.
Mayank Sharma: Let's start with your role in the project and how you got involved with prpl. You were once the Project Lead at OpenMoko?
Mirko Lindner: That was my first job in an open source company, basically running the development of the open source UI for the phone. After that I went to work with Vodafone in different capacities – first built some mobile applications, then joined their innovations team and ultimately ended up in the fixed-net department, which is the team that builds all of the routers and gateways. There we realized that if you look at how ISPs and service providers in general build devices, especially in the router space, that they work with a large number of different suppliers and there is no standardization.
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