Smart Grid Open Source Community Aimed at Eco-Collaboration

Green Energy Corp, a software company that helps power providers move to the Smart Grid, launched an open source community this week to encourage developers to create Smart Grid-related software. TotalGrid.org serves as a collaboration and hosting portal for Smart Grid applications, tools, and protocols. Projects themselves will be hosted at GitHub.

Currently, there are three projects in the Total Grid community:

• * DNP3 (Distributed Network Protocol) – An important Smart Grid protocol that allows communication between field devices and control systems, such as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition).

• * Reef – The open source version of [commercial middleware platform] GreenBus.

• * Thin Client GUI – A powerful graphical user interface that allows comprehensive data visibility.

According to Green Energy Corp, "Future projects may include developer's tools, simulators, Modbus and IEC 61850 protocols, MultiSpeak adaptors and more." It's not necessary to register with Total Grid to view projects and delve into source code. To contribute to individual projects, however, developers are asked to sign a Contributor License Agreement [.doc] -- a boilerplate document that allows Green Energy Corp and individuals to use and modify any code you submit.