RFID goes open-source

A couple of entrepreneurs out of Toronto have launched an open-source project called The RadioActive Foundation. It's mission? To develop free software for radio frequency identification (RFID) networks--a budding branch of information technology aimed at tracking all manner of people and things via tiny radio devices.

RadioActive, which launched earlier this month, is focusing on three applications initially: 1) a system for exchanging RFID data among business partners 2) middleware for gathering and filtering data from RFID readers 3) hardware simulation and testing tools.

Foundation co-founder Somen Mondal says the group aspires to do for RFID what the open-source program Apache, the most widely used Web server software, did for the Internet. "Without organizations such as Apache it would be difficult to imagine the Internet being as robust as it is. We intend on the RadioActive Software Foundation fulfilling that industry requirement," he said in a statement.