It just seems stupid to be using a product like HASSIO in a completely offline environment.
Not everyone uses HassIO in the same way. While it may seem stupid to you to use it offline, not everyone wants or needs the online only features such as weather updates. With things like MQTT you can have complete automation without internet access.
While my HassIO machine is also connected to the internet, I don’t think offline use should be impossible or not possible. Why should it be? This makes for interesting reading:
The cloud will receive updates and improve itself over time so it is able to serve you better. Until it’s not. There are many reasons why your home might lose its connection to the cloud. The internet can stop working, an update might have gone wrong or the servers running the cloud crash. When this happens, your house should be able to keep functioning.
If you want the convenience of an internet connection and to be able to use all the features that come with internet connectivity you have that option.
if you don’t want an internet connection then you can do that too. But that doesn’t mean you will be able to take the full advantage of the features that HA offers.
If I unplug my internet connection then it’s likely that over 90% of my automations will still run and every one of my smart home devices can still be controlled via the frontend connected thru my local network.
You have to accept that if you don’t want/can’t have internet access that there’s going to have to be trade-offs that you will have to accept.
It doesn’t include any proprietary services at all. HassOS uses Google’s NTP servers for time sync. Yes, the developer could have made that configurable, but you could always open an issue.
I’m not sure how you got to there, the use of Google’s NTP servers is not a privacy concern. Yes, the default Google TTS could be viewed that way, but if you’ve run into problems with the offline TTS components, open an issue.
You are free to fork the open source and compile your own version. You have the freedom (liberty) to fork & modify the software. It happens to include some free-to-use (no cost) services with which you disagree. Apparently you are confised about the definition of FOSS.
You are NOT free to complain and have the developers cater to your desires unless you hire them to explicitly do so.
The modern definition defines free software by whether or not the recipient has the following four freedoms:[8]
The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
Freedoms 1 and 3 require source code to be available because studying and modifying software without its source code is highly impractical.
I remember people a while back having issues with getting time over NTP, that’s great that the NTP is not hardcoded anymore, I should have checked the docs before posting.
If you run a local NTP server then HassIO looks like you should in theory be able to run local only and offline.
I use Home Assistsnt without internet access and have no problem using the position of the sun in my automations. It’s a calculation, not an internet service.
You could redirect all outgoing calls to the google NTP servers on your network to your own local NTP server. People do that all the time for hardcoded DNS over in the PiHole community.
I gave it a shot and installed hassio on raspbian. In fact I’m not forced anymore to use google services! This is a big plus for privacy and I have now more freedom in my setup!
I also added a RTC now to my (raspbian lite based) hassio installation and can tell it works! You just follow the tutorials for installation and home assistant grabs the time from the host system (raspbian) and this one comes from the RTC then or a configured (and available) ntp server
