Thanks for your work man. There are a lot of people using it and they should be grateful for everything you’ve done for them. I don’t like seeing this entitlement of users using free software and often block people on the facebook hass group that approach things thinking that they are owed something from people who spend their free time making things for others.
I do also agree with OP to some extent that this shouldn’t be pushed as the “new standard” until we are sure that it’s actually good enough for that. I think that announcement was very premature, and I for one have a working Zwave network already and had zero interest in messing with something that was working. I’m glad I made that decision not to try moving to the new zwave implementation and I think anyone who doesn’t actively want to beta test this, should make this same decision.
When it really becomes the new standard and is finished, I will start to plan a migration, but it’s too mission critical for me to play with personally. For me, at least, it allows me to avoid frustration and the demands that come with using beta software that may not work for me. I think if more people decided this way, it would lessen the burden on you, and may make the environment less toxic for you so that you can start to enjoy it again…
I do agree that the hass team should probably make a clear statement that the existing zwave integration is still the official one and will be until some undefined time in the future when something better is available and working as well or better than what we have as the built in standard today.
First of all, I’m glad that you are alright, and congratulations on your promotion! I too would like to personally thank you for all of your years of hard work. None of my comments above were meant to criticize you for stepping back and I hope that came through. I understand the demands and certainly understand that you’re a volunteer. My concern was simply with the seeming focus by the HA project on one single project to the rejection of others. And what I, at least, consider to be the premature pressure placed on the qt-openzwave project by HA pushing people towards it as the new path.
I’m sorry that you were treated poorly by the community and I hope that this can be improved. I only started using HA over the summer and I’ve certainly found the members of this project, and at times the maintainers, to be much more Type A than in other communities.
Justin, thanks for all the work you’ve done. We really appreciate it. Sorry to hear that the community has been this awful. Sadly within open source communities there can be a lot of entitlement that can bring out the worst in people
For the future of Z-Wave: we’ll have to see how to go from here. The Z-Wave integration devs are making an overview of the possible options. This will be published to the architecture repository when ready.
@Fishwaldo Thank you for taking the time to provide some clarity.
Everything you write makes sense. And I’m happy to note that your ‘personal issues’ were at least in part positive issues (congrats on the promotion).
I for one will not pretend to understand what it means to volunteer on a beta that already has >100.000 users (not counting that often 1 such user in reality often is a whole household of users), and I can only guess how many hundreds of thousands more are waiting to migrate towards it when it is stable.
Nevertheless I do understand that you owe us nothing and we owe you a lot (not in the least gratitude and respect). I think most of the people posting in the thread are of that position as well, but the world is a big place and I can unfortunately imagine that a sizeable group has not treated you properly!
I hope some competent people take up your offer to be helped.
Meanwhile for me personally, my few months of experience with Home Assistant have been amazing and I’d love to use it permanently. Good Z-wave support is an essential element for that as that is what most of my devices use (and because it is critical I have waited with the z-wave part until I fully grasped and was comfortable with Home Assistant). Based on your feedback, I will carefully test the current native z-wave integration to see whether it suits my needs despite being out of date. In case it doesn’t, I’ll postpone a decision on whether to move to Home Assistant until some unknown future date when there is a stable z-wave solution for Home Assistant.
Given the popularity of Home Assistant and the many z-wave users (which in my view also for the foreseeable future has very compelling advantages over alternatives such as wifi and zigbee), I have faith this will come, and I’m very happy to read the above post of @balloob that they are looking at options!
I understand. But what you and many people in this thread don’t understand is: HA has no issues with alternatives. @paulstronaut is demanding that HA develops the other addon when it doesn’t even develop qt-openzwave. It’s ridiculous to expect that. No one is stopping anyone from creating any other zwave options.
I made no demands in this entire thread. I asked questions about what could be done to clarify who is responsible for what. How we can ensure we’re not tied to a single person being available for critical issues, etc.
You sure about that? This post that rudely shut down is basically demanding that @frenck takes the helm of the addon. And you’re using it to fuel the fire in this thread. How about editing the post and removing that portion then if that’s not your intentions?
Even if I’m not an admin, I would politely suggest to not continue the back and forth of who said what and in which tone or with which intentions. These discussions don’t contribute to the purpose of the topic, which is bringing some clarity on the future of z-wave in home assistant. I think this thread has already helped in that respect, in that it has become evident that such a reflection is necessary and the Z-Wave integration devs are looking at it. I thank them wholeheartedly in advance.
Home assistanat/Nabu Casa should support OZW integration and Justin(a lot of people use zwave, and so can HA more growe to get better) with developers, and we will support HA and developers. Some new ozw donation/subscription to get things rolling?
@Fishwaldo thanks for your work on the project! I know precisely what you mean by your statements, having developed numerous open source project for hundreds or thousands of users (not as many as you support on this, but enough) and it can be extremely frustrating to deal with folks who feel they are entitled to your free time and who criticize your work. It’s no wonder you have stepped back, I have stepped back from many of my own projects that became publicly toxic.
Folks don’t really grasp the “I’m doing this for the good of the community and owe you nothing” concept. Like I stated in my post above, if someone doesn’t like something then they need to roll up their sleeves and figuring out the code to fix the problem they have.
I’m disheartened to hear your work on this project is greatly reduced, as Z-Wave is a critical part of my home automation and if nobody else picks up the mantle to assist and push it forward then I fear that, in time, Z-Wave won’t work well. For the time being all of my Z-Wave devices work as anticipated and I have no complaints, but without maintenance that could all change.
My contribution to HA is going to revolve more around the HomeKit improvements I would like to see, as I have a lot of experience in that department having developed the HomeKit integration for my last software community, so I don’t know if I’ll ever dive into the Z-Wave project or not but am certainly open to entertaining the option. Sadly, I don’t fully grasp the development environment of HASS just yet so cutting my teeth on HomeKit will be a first step since it’s familiar territory.
Again, thank you for your contribution, many of us appreciate it and have no problems, I am certainly in that category.
I think this what most of us are asking for, and thanks @balloob for taking ownership of this issue and demonstrating your continued leadership. Nobody should be expecting miracles, but a little clarity about what to expect can go a long way.
@Fishwaldo, thanks for offering your point of view on the situation. I think your decision to back off is perfectly understandable. Most people would have reacted the same way.
Now I hate to be that guy, but we have to bring up the following quote and what it means to us, as OZW users and to the HA ZWave long term strategy as a whole:
While Fishwaldo’s motivations behind this step are totally understandable, this does in fact mean that in the context of larger scale use on the HA platform, OZW is factually dead. It means that the current status of slow activity on the project is not just temporary, but is there to stay. It also means that there will be no roadmap HA users who depend on ZWave can look forward to. It means that a rare and hard to reproduce bug may never be fixed ever. As much as I feel with Fishwaldo, realistically this is not a foundation the HA core team can build a long term ‘path to the future’ around.
Of course there is no immediate miracle remedy to this unfortunate situation. But it again underlines the necessity of not only being very open minded towards alternative implementations, but to even actively encourage them. I know that is more easily said than done.
@Fishwaldo and others, I don’t know if this question is appropriate. Feel free to remove if you do not feel to discuss this here. Have you ever approached SL or Aeotec (you probably have good contacts with both) over a possible partnership on OZW ? They could help both financially and in terms of human resource to take some of the burden off your shoulders. Given the size and momentum Home Assistant has reached, I would think there should be a common interest in having good and stable ZWave support available for HA.
Thank you for all the efforts @Fishwaldo. Hopefully one of the following can happen now:
Your post prompts some serious Dev help to come onboard OpenZWave and the HA integration to move it forward (and hopefully bring you back enthusatically again)
@balloob and other core HA team come up with a new plan, possibly … #3
the HA community adopts zwavejs2mqtt as the new “go to” ZW platform for HA adn it gets extra development efforts concetrated in it.
Thanks for everything you’ve done up to this point. I’m sorry for the toxicity you’ve experienced and hope some people will re-evaluate their sense of entitlement. Best of luck with everything and thanks again!
Thank you @Fishwaldo for your contributions and being so blunt with where you are at. I have contributed to various OSS projects (not nearly as large) and have gotten burnt out by the demands as well and can empathize to some small degree. I think it’s important for people to be up front about the amount of effort (and how taxing) these labors of love can be.
I’m new to the HA community and don’t know what the tolerance level is for some of the squeaky wheels is, but hopefully we as a community can improve by encouraging a community supporting each other with our individual skills and not being tolerant of hostilities and demands.
Thanks @Fishwaldo for all you’ve done. I’ve been following github and I can’t imagine how hard it has been to maintain the C++ codebase.
I bet the lack of volunteers has a direct correlation with how approachable C++/QT codebase is.
This is why everyone should be optimistic about the future of zwave-js. It is written in javascript/typescript the most popular language in the world as of 2020 (for the record I prefer c#). The frontend is using vuejs and I’m actively working to contribute UX improvements.
I’m looking forward to a great 2021 zwave hass experience.
and I’m actively working to contribute UX improvements.
zwave hass experience.