The Linux Foundation announced the foundation of a new umbrella group called LF Edge designed to help unify a fragmented edge-computing marketplace and offer a common framework for future edge projects.

The initial announcement lists five open source projects that will serve as the nucleus of the LF Edge framework. Those projects are:

Akraino Edge Stack, EdgeX Foundry, and the Open Glossary of Edge Computing are pre-existing projects, while Project EVE and Home Edge were announced as part of the LF Edge news.

In a blog post, Linux Foundation general manager for IoT and edge Arpit Joshipura said that fragmentation in the edge market prompted the group to announce LF Edge. The open source world alone has many projects pursuing similar goals, to say nothing of the commercial sector’s proliferation of edge and IoT vendors. Ensuring that a given company’s products are LF Edge-compatible can help ensure interoperability and avoid potential vendor lock-in problems in the future.

Interoperability is a key concern for companies adopting IoT – a given IoT product currently needs to be compatible across sensors, edge devices and the cloud back-end, none of which is guaranteed to be the case. A simple “LF Edge” certification could eliminate a lot of procurement and implementation headaches for businesses trying to move into the world of IoT.

This story, "Linux Foundation backs a group to boost edge networking" was originally published by Network World.