Alright, I wanted to give my two cents on this issue of payment for the Alexa feature. I fully understand wanting to do some type of fundraising for the project. To help facilitate and pay for continuing costs associated with such a large scale open source community, but again, we’ve seen that this isn’t necessary. OpenHAB along with many other non smart home based open source communities far exceeding the size of HA live on just fine without the need for a subscription based monetization model. Some of these services use far more resources for hosting than HA ever will and have far more expansive communities. Yet again, they do not charge.
The rely on the generosity of others to keep the project going, those who believe in it, who enjoy it and get value out of it. Monetizing a section of HA erodes that trust and dissuades those who would’ve otherwise donated time, energy and money into continuing the project to think that their fiscal resources cannot be used or are not needed.
Just think of the number of people who’ve posted in this thread and in the comments on the original post who said they’d be willing to make a one time donation, to then be told that isn’t on the table at all. Effective causing HA to place its fiscal bets on a small subset of its user base. Those will amazon echo devices and willing to pay a pretty hefty monthly fee. (It is highly unlike that those without amazon devices will ever pay $5/month to support HA)
What is worse is that the transparency of how this money will be used was discovered by those asking questions in the comments section of the announcement post, not by the leaders of this community being up front about how the money will be spent. Leading many to believe that the $5/month would cover the operational cost of the Alexa service only to learn quickly afterwards that the plan was to use those resources for other things. Like the hosting of hass.io services.
Lastly, and what I am most upset about is the erosion of associated open source projects. Many of you may have noticed that haaska has not received any major updates and currently doesn’t support v3 of the Alexa Smart Home Skills API. For those who have looked closely into the issues and pull requests for haaska you might have noticed that these lack of pull requests alarmingly align with rumors and speculation circulated by @robbiet480 who discretely mentioned future support for alexa smart home built into HA.
My major concern is that the actively development of haaska stopped when an alternative (paid or not) was tossed onto the table and I suspect that the developer of haaska and the HA leadership actively encouraged the lack of development for haaska as the cloud component became closer to reality.
For those who have said that we do not have to pay for the cloud component that haaska and emulated hue exist. I agree they do, in a state that doesn’t even begin to compare to a fully featured use of the Smart Home Skill provided by Amazon and the lack of development on those options being stagnant is the exact reason why open source projects should remain open and free and why I strongly believe at a minimum that the cloud code for HA should be released publicly.
Anyways, enough of my thoughts. I hope some can agree.
