Home Assistant 🤝 Ubiquiti Networks

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TL;DR: Ubiquiti Networks has hired Paulus Schoutsen, the founder of Home Assistant, to support Home Assistant’s goals of making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Home Assistant is an open source project that thus far has been run by people in their spare time. In the last four and a half years it has grown from just me building a tiny framework with a handful of integrations to having our own operating system, over a 1000 integrations, superb performance, contributions by over 900 people, and our main Docker image has been pulled over 10 million times!

Observing this growth and passionate community, Ubiquiti Networks approached us.

Ubiquiti Networks currently focuses on 3 main technologies: high-capacity distributed Internet access, unified information technology, and next-gen consumer electronics for home and personal use. Their enterprise quality combined with their affordability has made them very popular among our users. They also share another passion of ours: trying to avoid clouds. Take for example their UniFi Video IP surveillance solution: it is a completely local hosted solution.

They recognize great potential in Home Assistant becoming the defacto platform for the home: fast, open source and local. They also want to deepen the integration of Ubiquiti Networks products in Home Assistant and may even support hosting Home Assistant instances on their hardware.

And so we have agreed that I (Paulus, founder Home Assistant) will join Ubiquiti Networks as a full time employee to focus on growing Home Assistant. I’ll now be able to devote my full energy to making Home Assistant easier to configure for users, improving the integration with device makers and making it easier to create, maintain and evolve integrations.

Ubiquiti Networks will not acquire any ownership of Home Assistant. We will remain an independent and open source project, just improving faster than ever with the support of Ubiquiti Networks.

I’m very excited about this opportunity and 2018 will be a really really great year for Home Assistant!

![](upload://1sVXr1xYuwcL6j9w4z4kpti47Y3.jpeg) Paulus Schoutsen, founder of Home Assistant, at the NYC Ubiquiti office.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2018/04/12/ubiquiti-and-home-assistant/
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Congratulations @balloob!

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Van harte meneertje!! Wel benieuwd hoe de onafhankelijkheid van dit project overeind kan blijven, maar daar zijn vast goeie afspraken over gemaakt!

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:+1:

Sounds like a win all round - Home Assistant gets financial support, and they get proven integration with a home automation platform :smiley:

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Fantastic, Congratulations !

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Congratulations bud @balloob

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Great news, congrats!

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Very good!

A great ex-PFSenser Chris Buechler is also at UBNT.

Perhaps we also get some nice hardware from UBNT that runs HA in the future :wink:

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Congratulations @balloob! This are great news and it makes a lot of sense, since Ubiquity has plenty of experience on WiFi networking and Home Assistant’s main communication protocol between devices is over WiFi. Very confident and exited about the future! Thanks for all the effort involving you and the community to evolve and maintain this already great platform!

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Congrats buddy!
Wish you good luck in your new venture!

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Congrats. This is exciting!

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Sounds interesting. So if Ubiquiti did not buy HA, what are they getting? There has to be a “gain” somewhere? Maybe I read it wrong but it almost sounds like they are at least getting Paulus and most likely or potentially looking to integrate HA into their platforms in a seem-less way by having the founder and lead developer help them. But I’m also curious in how Ubiquiti is looking at the full home automation aspect. Wondering if they have other products on the horizon (sensors/switches/etc). The part I like is that they did not “buy” or acquire HA. I think that would be a disaster. I also wonder if there is any potential for some products/vendors that won’t be “allowed” to be integrated with HA in the future. I realize open source is just that, but there is concern when corporations get involved.

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Congrats!!!

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Great news :smiley:

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This is great news. Congrats!

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Sounds great, but the question is brings is if HA will be kept as an open-source for long…?

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Wow great news, my two loves have come together UBNT, and HA!!!

Congrats on the new gig!

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Congrats :clap:

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Congratulations! Wish you all the best at Ubiquiti!

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Nice, this will ensure the future development and also give something back to you (a full time job) i cannot wait to see the next updates in the future. Nothing wrong with better integration with their tools (and it is already one of the better ones)