“Open Source Software (OSS) is by far the most exciting lever + trend for major structural change in technology over the past decade and little has been written about how this works from a data-driven lens: several $X00B+ to $1T+ industries are getting disrupted by OSS (enabled fundamentally by the internet and connectedness — Marc Andreessen aptly describes the internet itself as “the next Silicon Valley”).Mega-industries getting eaten by OSS: finance/payments (Blockchains), cloud computing (Kubernetes), machine learning/AI (TensorFlow), mobile apps (Android), hardware (RISC-V) + many more.The implications of all of these realities make OSS an extremely critical macro-trend that cannot be ignored — at a fundamental level.” Open Source Capital Founder and General Partner, Joseph JacksAs 2018 comes to a close, we are thrilled to announce the final cohort of grantees for the year. The Open Source Software ecosystem developing around the IOTA project continues to grow every day and these are the early building blocks that will form the cornerstones of the Machine Economy built on the IOTA Core protocol in the years to come. We could not be more grateful for the IOTA community’s commitment to continuing to explore, test, innovate and build.Our final round of grantees for the year includes some of the IOTA Ecosystem’s most prolific developers. These innovators have been developing real world use cases and OSS for the IOTA Ecosystem for many months and we are very happy to support them to scale up their efforts. We wish them the best of luck and are very excited to see the results of their work in the coming year!M2M Ecosystem Showcase ($367,560 USD)Nino Ulrich has been one of the best contributors the IOTA Ecosystem has had over the past year. Solutions like IAMPASS and the IOTA Industrial Factory 4.0 have been some of the best demonstrations of the IOTA technology that have been produced to date. Now, we are taking it to the next level with the M2M Ecosystem Showcase.This M2M ecosystem showcase shall provide a functioning prototype that can be demonstrated by Akita and replicated for a future IOTA Lab or other lab, any corporation or even at home. The complete process will be documented from scratch to the final showcase. The code will be made public in an open source GitHub repository and all the necessary components will be listed in a respective blueprint cookbook (Hardware, Software, Programming Skills, external resources).“The rapid evolution of technology and machines effects all of us, whether we like, dislike or don’t even realize it. AKITA makes tangible installations that everyone can see, touch and understand. Utilizing the intangible power of the IOTA Tangle, we are going to demonstrate, what a direct machine-to-machine (M2M) economy can look like today and how it can benefit us humans. During this complex project we will combine modular hardware and software elements on all layers. This includes machine communication, value transfer-based action, energy efficiency, different types of nodes and particular IOTA features like Masked Authenticated Messaging (MAM). The simple goal is to enable machines to buy and sell services, energy and even pay taxes autonomously.This project is a child of the open-source and crowd movement. It would not be possible without the community, the IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund and integration of traditional companies, who embrace co-creation.”Nino Ulrich, Co-Founder of AKITATo learn more, check out the M2M Ecosystem Showcase project page in the IOTA Ecosystem!XDK2MAM ($85,150 USD)Daniel De Michele and Alejandro Elustondo are staple contributors in the IOTA Ecosystem. From hosting meetups, developing new use cases and traveling the world to discuss the IOTA technology, we are thrilled to have such amazing contributors who are this committed to the vision of IOTA.The XDK2MAM vision is to provide an easy and quick-to-use set of full solutions to enable anyone with a XDK 110 to start streaming sensor data to the Tangle. This could be used to monitor environments, industrial machinery or just to provide a sensor feed for the Data Marketplace.XDK2MAM is already a Bosch partner in the XDK Ecosystem and will provide solutions for all the available XDK 110 methods (http/mqtt/ble/udp). Their roadmap also includes software to analyze the sensor’s data and be able to visualize it and define effects for events (i.e., set alarms at certain values of a given sensor). The XDK2MAM final goal, and maybe the most ambitious, is to provide software for the XDK 110 to be able to publish sensors stream to the Tangle by itself. A solution of this nature would be of value in the field of Data Marketplaces, where you could offer your sensors data without needing to rely on any external server to collect and publish it. XDK2MAM is a IOTA Data Marketplace participant and has already provided solutions to connect the XDK110 to it.“XDK2MAM aims to provide quality and well-documented open source code to allow full integration between the Bosch XDK 110 sensors node and the IOTA Tangle. We understand that this piece of hardware is essential to prototype IoT. Therefore, the existence of ready to use code and guides to allow developers and non developers to unbox their XDKs and connect them to the Tangle is fundamental. This will enable proofs of work to flourish around IOTA.”Daniel De Michele and Alejandro Elustondo, XDK2MAM Co-FoundersTo learn more, check out the XDK2MAM project page in the IOTA Ecosystem!CryptoCore ($59,110 USD)Thomas Pototschnig (or as he in known in the community, Microengineer) is another one of the IOTA Ecosystem’s best contributors, especially when it comes to hardware. He has already developed and documented the IOTA FPGA PoW accelerator for raspberry pi, and is a founding contributor to the outsourced PoWaaS startup powsrv.io.Now Thomas will put his skills to use by building a FPGA to enable embedded systems to run the IOTA core functions. This is a critical component to allowing IOTA to be run on small IoT devices and a big step towards future real world applications.“The goal of the Crypto Core FPGA project is to enable embedded systems to do IOTA core functions in a fast, secure and efficient way. It will offer a high-level Api for e.g. address generation, signing, seed-management and PoW — and later MaM+. This will pave the way for true IoT IOTA applications which were not possible before (in a practical sense).I’m honored to get the support of the IOTA foundation which makes this project possible!”Thomas Pototschnig, IOTA Ecosystem DeveloperWe congratulate the latest round of grantees for their amazing contributions and wish them luck for their upcoming projects. As always, you can see the full project proposals and grant payments on the EDF Transparency Tracker which stores and immutable record of the agreement in the IOTA ledger.In the near future we will also give an update on the progress of previous grantees and we can provide a sneak peak to one here:We wish a happy holidays to everyone in the IOTA Ecosystem and we look forward to continuing to build with you all in the upcoming year!The Third Cohort of IOTA Ecosystem Development Fund Grantees was originally published in IOTA on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.