Topics from the Open Printing microconference

Networking has become cheap and reliable enough, including consumer-side via wifi, that printers, and a lot of other things that used to be devices, are graduating to appliances (and a lot of things that never were devices are graduating to appliances too).

That completely changes the landscape, because:
– appliances are autonomous, and do not need a computer to be driven (they can be managed via dumb buttons, cloud connexion, smartphones, alexa, etc)
– the network is shared by many networked things (some definitely not trusted)
– many clients can talk to the appliance in parallel, it's no longer a master-slave 1:1 relationship

That means that instead of designing custom serial, parallel, or whatever protocols, people need to design networking APIs, with strong auth and encryption, and multi-client handling.

The mental and trust model is not the same, and of course people will try to emulate the old device model over networks as long as possible, but mid term it's deader than dead.

And, we'll soon see a replay of the bad old protocol wars, this time network API side.