The goal of HiveMQ open source MQTT community is to make MQTT and HiveMQ part of the central nervous system for any IoT solution, say developers
The MQTT Message Broker, HiveMQ, is now available as open source software under the name of HiveMQ Community Edition (HiveMQ CE).
Released under the Apache 2.0 license on Github, HiveMQ CE is a Java-based open source MQTT broker that fully supports MQTT 3.x and MQTT 5. It is the foundation of the HiveMQ Enterprise Connectivity and Messaging Platform and implements all MQTT features.
Announcing the creation of the HiveMQ open source MQTT community in a blog post, Dominik Obermaier, co-founder and CTO at HiveMQ, wrote, “The goal of this community is to make MQTT and HiveMQ part of the central nervous system for any IoT solution. We want to create an open platform that is extensible, secure, reliable and based on open standards. We want to create a community that enables developers, students, researchers and companies to build innovative technology that integrates MQTT everywhere.”
He noted that MQTT and HiveMQ has benefited tremendously from the open source and open standards community.
“The success of MQTT as an industry standard was accelerated greatly after OASIS announced MQTT 3.1.1 as an official standard and many open source implementations for brokers and clients were created by individuals who wanted to contribute back to the community,” Dominik said.
With the first two projects, HiveMQ Community Edition (CE) and HiveMQ MQTT Client, they want to focus on providing a high quality MQTT broker and client.
HiveMQ MQTT Client is a Java library that implements the MQTT 3.1.1 and MQTT 5 specification. HiveMQ developed this library in collaboration with BMW Car IT. It is built for mission critical deployments that require a resilient and rock-stable MQTT implementation.
Both projects are licensed under the Apache 2 software license and both will continue to be developed by HiveMQ developers.
HiveMQ’s Expectations From their Open Source Strategy
IoT applications can generate a lot of data and so it is critical to select a technology that is designed to move IoT data across networks and cloud platforms.
HiveMQ makes it easy to move data to and from connected IoT devices and enterprise systems in an efficient, fast and reliable manner, the company says in its website.
According to the developers, HiveMQ was built to address some of the key technical challenges that organizations face when building new IoT applications.
Commercially, HiveMQ developers hope to achieve three goals from their open source strategy:
- We want more people using high quality MQTT implementations.
- We want to make it easier for our partners, students, researchers or other open source projects to use HiveMQ and MQTT. We hope this will create more value for the entire ecosystem, including our company and our customers.
- The additional functionality and improvements driven by open source development will be used by our commercial software offerings, so our customers can profit from any improvements contributed by a larger developer audience.
However, Dominik asserted that they will continue to sell commercial editions of HiveMQ, HiveMQ Professional and HiveMQ Enterprise.
He said, “Our customers are deploying business critical applications using HiveMQ and MQTT so they require features that are beyond the MQTT specification. Our commercial editions will include features such as the HiveMQ Control Center for monitoring and logging, elastic clustering for scalability and high availability, enterprise extensions such as our new HiveMQ Enterprise Extension for Kafka, and features required for use in complex corporate environments.”
As the core of their commercial products will be the open source HiveMQ Community Edition, Dominik noted that their customers will benefit from the new open source community.
