Open-source project to get gadgets talking via the net

The open-source movement has grown steadily in recent years.

More than 5,400 developers have downloaded a new open-source operating system designed to enable digital devices to communicate with each other.

They are now looking at ways in which Webinos could be used to connect a range of devices such as mobile phones, car stereos, heart monitors and TVs.

Webinos is a 15m euro ($18.4m; £11.8m) project supported by more than 30 organisations, including the EU.

BMW, W3C, Sony, Samsung and Telefonica are among its commercial partners.

While other operating systems that use the internet to connect devices to each other already exist, most are pre-installed and cannot be customised by individual users.

Free for all

Technical co-ordinator Nick Allott told the BBC Webinos was designed to provide an alternative to “the mighty four” proprietary systems – Apple, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla.

So far people in 155 countries have accessed the Webinos website.

“People want to control the technology because if you control the technology you control the money,” he said. “But it should be free and open to everybody.

“Where we are operating is trying to build the open-source community. That’s how web browsers started.”

Webinos is designed to run on PCs and Android-operated mobile handsets.

Car manufacturer BMW was also looking at incorporating Webinos in its vehicles, Mr Allott said.

“If you get on your mobile phone and find out your destination before you get in the car, you’ll be able to push it to the car and it programmes the sat-nav ready to go,” he said.

“Same with music – you choose your playlist, you can consume it on your phone and push it into the car.”

The technology also lends itself to healthcare. One demo application enables a heart monitor to share data with the wearer’s mobile phone and the computer of their GP.

The user can dictate who has access to the data, meaning that if they change doctor, they can also change their access to the heart monitor records.

The World’s Largest Solar-Powered Boat

The open-source movement has grown steadily in recent years.

A survey in May 2012, carried out by web monitoring service Pingdom, of 10,000 popular websites found 61% were powered by either Apache or Nginx open source software.