Home assistant and external investors

I know nabu casa got posts from investors who dont quite understand how opensource works and home assistant is not for sale.

Yet i think that there are two options of creating for profit companies that use home assistant.
why for profit companies with investments?
well, to get the ideas running you need implementation time building up getting costumers. the ideas arnt profitable right away. but can be very profitable in the future.
Ideal for investors.

enterprise home assistant.
At least in Europe smart homes in public places like a hospital,university,school, or a library need to apply to the wgac accessibility standards. (Well like any of the smart homes does that)

And we all heard stories of a public places that had a smart system and need to do a 100% overhaul because the system is outdated. so its cheaper to leave all the lights on 24/7

I think Home assistant can dive in.

With an enterprise version with other payed subscription LTS versions and no Hacs store

the company manages for example a LTS (that runs for example 2 months behind on features with normal Hass, with an major release every 6 months) the company picks up a .x release and maintain bug fixes. and a long 1 month BETA.
the company will have remote access. (perhaps weed out/obsure private data) and apply all changes to the home assistant instance the client requests. and together manage hardware installations. (for work wide onsite help the company needs to be really big)

  • companies are more than happy to have a full service contract. (or a X hours a months feature requests)
  • The most effort can be put in by the for profit company. And the improvements given back to the smart home foundation.
  • companies will have a rock solid home assistant setup. All features are well tested by the community before they get into LTS
  • It sure will be expensive but that is OKE. it will put a price card on home assistant with out personal tickering. I dont think this will steal any job from the home assistant community rather increase it. Smaller companies that dont want to pay the big license fee. Just use the LTS and manage it in house.
  • If it works home assistant will invade the public space with solutions that don’t have to be completely reinstalled ever 6 years.
  • Giving the organizations that use home assistant more hardware independence.

rent a developer.
Home assistant is in my personal option one of the easiest platforms i worked with especially with the power it gives. Not every one has that luck.

On facebook there are questions of people that want home assistant setups but dont know how.
what if there is a platform on the web. you can connect to your home assistant and creates a simulated anonymized instance of your instance. Others can use to create new content on. Or can setup an readonly viewer session others can guide users to setup integrations/addons.

  • This opens up home assistant for a whole new audience. The I dont have the time and or skills group.
  • It allows advanced home assistant users the option to earn some side money with home assistant.
  • Because of the simulated instances. Home assistant Demos get a whole new dimension.
  • It will be up to the developers using the system. But it should be possible to share configs. blue-prints. to promote there work. providing a good resource for how to’s

thats my cup of tea. All because i dreamed last night seeing a home assistant panel in the bus showing the trafic information.

Why would you think I want to be a free tester for a for-profit company to benefit from my free work? Did I mention that my work is free - as in not getting paid by the for-profit company? Or anyone else?

I know there’s not a lot that HA can do right now to prevent for-profit companies from using HA in their businesses (and maybe they don’t even want to do anything about it) but it’s a completely different thing to specifically expect a change in the way HA runs now to cater to those companies. All on the backs of volunteers who will get no benefits from the company for their free labor.

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Im not sure how you think hospitals and other public places work. They dont want to get dirty with tech them selfs. I worked one year for a company that did content management for companies and also hospitals. They just want it to work.

With out a full on suport licence they will not get home assistant.
Being stuck on closed software. Updating the entire environment every 8 years. COSTING MONEY. TAX MONEY, SO YOUR MONEY.

The corporation with contribute code to core. Because of stability hacs should not be used. So a lot of features are going to core. And to everyone.
FOR FREE.

they will support the LTS versions so giving a other posibilty for less fuzz home assistant to users.
FOR FREE

only because you want that someone does not make money over your free work? I got news for you. THAT IS ALREADY HAPPENING. you never checked out home assistant on linkedin i guess.

Its not about paying for home assistant. Its paying for service getting it running.

Anyway its opensource there is zero protection for companies using the software and sell services for it. Already happening.

I have no issue supporting HA for free since HA isn’t charging me for the software and they are a non-profit company.

I have a problem providing free services to a for profit company.

if they want software then pay a company to develop it that doesn’t use free labor.

Yeah, I think I already acknowledged that. And my feelings on it.

They wont charge you for the software.
They charge you for the service running the software smooth.

Thats like how many big companies with opensource software work.

So you rather have spying software in public places than home assistant because then they did not use your work?

nabu casa took another approach, and for hospitals / companies there are supported and established solutions available which gets updates just like home assistant.
i do not think that home assistant atm can compete in this field.