The Linux Foundation Wants To Help Water Farms From The Cloud

Of the many possible areas for advancing Linux and open-source, the latest project being embraced by the Linux Foundation is Liquid Prep for helping farmers water their crops. It's a noble cause but not too Linux centered unless talking about cloud resources.

Liquid Prep is the newest project to be hosted by the Linux Foundation after being started by various IBM engineers during an employee coding challenge. Liquid Prep ties into a hardware water sensor located on a farm/garden for measuring the moisture level of the soil. From there they have a "highly visual and easy-to-use" mobile web application that with the moisture data interfaces with The Weather Company -- an IBM business -- and crop data housed in the IBM Cloud for figuring out a water schedule to help the farmer decide if they should water their crops.

After being developed the past two years by IBM employees, Liquid Prep is being developed now as open-source with a goal of helping farmers around the world water their crops with the least amount of water. Liquid Prep is developed under an Apache 2.0 license.

There exist similar products/technologies out there already albeit not open-source. Liquid Prep also appears focused on making an app that caters to low-literate farmers and drought prone areas. It's a worthwhile cause for water conservation but seemingly another branch away from Linux Foundation's original focus on advancing Linux/open-source and increasingly more towards hosting a variety of open-source projects started by their member organizations.

The code to Liquid Prep is housed on GitHub. Learn more about this Linux Foundation project at LinuxFoundation.org as part of today's call-for-code in looking for open-source community developers to help work on Liquid Prep.