It is open-source software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

It was initially developed by Free University of Berlin (FU Berlin), French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg).

[3] In 2016, the ED STIC Doctoral Prize 2017 of the University of Paris-Saclay was awarded to another co-founder, Oliver Hahm for his contribution to the project.

[10] A native port also enables RIOT to run as a Linux or macOS process, enabling use of standard developing and debugging tools such as GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), GNU Debugger, Valgrind, Wireshark, etc.

RIOT is partly Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant.