The Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), formerly the Zigbee Alliance, is a group of companies that maintain and publish the

Zigbee Zigbee is an IEEE 802.15.4-based specification for a suite of high-level communication protocols used to create personal area networks with small, low-power digital radios, such as for home automation, medical device data collection, and othe ...

standard and the soon to be

Matter In classical physics and general chemistry, matter is any substance that has mass and takes up space by having volume. All everyday objects that can be touched are ultimately composed of atoms, which are made up of interacting subatomic partic ...

standard. The name Zigbee is a registered

trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a type of intellectual property consisting of a recognizable sign, design, or expression that identifies products or services from a particular source and distinguishes them from others ...

of this group, and is not a single technical standard. The organization publishes

application profile In the information sciences, an application profile consists of a set of metadata elements, policies, and guidelines defined for a particular application. The elements may come from one or more element sets, thus allowing a given application to m ...

s that allow multiple

OEM An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...

vendors to create interoperable products. The relationship between IEEE 802.15.4 and Zigbee is similar to that between

IEEE 802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer commun ...

and the

Wi-Fi Alliance The Wi-Fi Alliance is a non-profit organization that owns the Wi-Fi trademark. Manufacturers may use the trademark to brand products certified for Wi-Fi interoperability. History Early 802.11 products suffered from interoperability problems be ...

. Over the years, the Alliance's membership has grown to over 500 companies, including the likes of Comcast, Ikea, Legrand, Samsung SmartThings, and Amazon. The Zigbee Alliance has three levels of membership: adopter, participant, and promoter. The adopter members are allowed access to completed Zigbee specifications and standards, and the participant members have voting rights, play a role in Zigbee development, and have early access to specifications and standards for product development. The requirements for membership in the Zigbee Alliance cause problems for

free-software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

developers because the annual fee conflicts with the

GNU General Public Licence The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

. The requirements for developers to join the Zigbee Alliance also conflict with most other free-software licenses. The Zigbee Alliance board of directors has been asked to make their license compatible with GPL, but refused.

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is limi ...

has GPL-licensed implementations. As of May 11, 2021, the Zigbee Alliance has been rebranded to Connectivity Standards Alliance.

References

External links

* {{Official website, https://csa-iot.org/ Standards organizations in the United States Organizations established in 2002 Organizations based in California