Are you sure you want to take that leap. I love OH and used it for 2 years. But the automation engine… The speed of development (major bugs were not fixed like for several months). That’s what brought me here. And now i don’t think i will ever go back…
Introduction of a new paid option (Cloud) without publishing the source code of the respective funktions behind is a signal for me to thing about alternatives. Usually, it is a start of deeper commercialisation… unfortunately. Thereare lots of examples…
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Please pay a visit to the doctor. These are dangerous symptoms of paranoia
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The whole Java thing is enough to make me avoid OpenHAB ;). I lost many brain cells in a prior life tuning JVM’s for a large financial site to the point that Java gives me night terrors.
I share is view, paying user will want their service to work flawlessly and the effort will be invested in paid service rather than free part.
And to make a paid service to ease setup is not necessarily a bad thing, there is server cost and it’s normal to pay for it. But there is no really reason to not share the code of this service, except to make it a paid option, not just a paid hosting…
However I tried OpenHAD as well, and it was quite complex to install/configure/use, hass is much easier to operate/maintain in my opinion.
Anyone is free to fork HASS or make a commercial business around it. By all means, please go ahead.
If anyone has the capability to do that, its the creator.
Therefore, there is no need to get excited. Nobody is breaking any rules.
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Exactly, you remind me of another consequence that could be deadly, segmentation.
I find the critics about the paid cloud component unfair.
- How you know the cloud part will never be released in any kind of way, there was never any comment about it in either direction as far as I know.
- You will never need the cloud component, it just saves you from setting up portforwarding, api keys and reduces config.
Also the reasons why HA needs the cloud component are very good in my opinion. In the beginning HA was only used by the very hacky people (like me) who stood up and tried to fix things and helped. Nowadays HA has become more and more accessible, but these people don’t directly contribute to the project but require its resources. Thus I find it fair to have a paid component, that takes away some complexity. So more people can contribute to the project in the way they feel fit to.
Donations are not a solution to this problem. I think there is more then enough evidence from other OpenSource projects.
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I totally agree. balloob is working hard to make HASS more palatable for novices and parts of that is seamless cloud integrations. Everything cloud costs money. Official Alexa Skill = money, IOS app = money, IFTTT = money. If HASS is to have the neat bells and whistles like commercial products, it needs money.
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I can see the arguments from both sides in this. Having very long experience of open source e-shops I have seen many projects raise and go under.
A serious project need to be funded in the long run to survive. How this should be done can be discussed.
If an open source project become a project where greed takes over from the original idea it will sooner or later die. Look at a from beginning very successful e-shop like Prestashop. I have it used from the start but have become more and more frustrated over lack of support and expensive modules. Floods of developers and customers has left, especially when the fork Thirtybees was launched. A group of developers got finally fed up with the state of Prestashop and decided to fork it. Up to now it is very successful and will stay so as long as its very strict keep to the original idea. The fork is cleaned from thousands of bugs, all modules made by the core team is free to use and the commission charged for third party modules are very moderate. One module, and more will come has been crowd funded Prestashop today lives a very poor life, even if the “owner” of this open source project tries to show the opposite
HA is today an alternative for those of us who want to keep our info local and not have to rely on an internet connection to get things to work. Perhaps I am old fashioned but I would never dream of using Google Analytics in our shops. Why should we feed Google with information we have no control over how it is used. Especially when there is alternatives. That danger is very real when we rely on cloud services, whatever the name.
So please keep the HA what it is today. If the cloud is necessary for some features like Alexa it is OK but never make the cloud and the payment for it a must for the HA to work, because then it will loose loads of users and become one of all the good ideas that slowly will be forgotten
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god bless you sir