The Open Home Foundation launches [LWN.net]

The Open Home Foundation has announced its existence as a home and support resource for free home-automation projects.

We created the Open Home Foundation to fight for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And every person who lives in one.
Ahead of today, we've transferred over 240 projects, standards, drivers, and libraries—Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Improv Wi-Fi, Wyoming, and so many more—to the Open Home Foundation. This is all about looking into the future. We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware. To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves—so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes.

The Open Home Foundation launches

Posted Apr 23, 2024 0:13 UTC (Tue) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (5 responses)

"support us by subscribing to Nabu Casa"... Which is owned by the developer of Home Assistant.

The stated goals, I like.

Having dealt with various home automation/control systems for over 10 years (yes, including X10) I have to say Nabu Casa left about the worst taste in my mouth.

This has the earmarks of a PR blitz.

The Open Home Foundation launches

Posted Apr 23, 2024 2:18 UTC (Tue) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link]

> I have to say Nabu Casa left about the worst taste in my mouth.

Why? Implementation quality or business practices?

The Open Home Foundation launches

Posted Apr 23, 2024 12:57 UTC (Tue) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Huh. I haven't had much interaction with the company themselves other than following the blog and paying for the service, but I've had nothing bad in my experience.

The Open Home Foundation launches

Posted Apr 23, 2024 17:21 UTC (Tue) by danielthompson (subscriber, #97243) [Link] (1 responses)

Not quite sure why this leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

Among then many important things about Nabu Casa is that they never called themselves HomeAssistant.com. In other words they aren't using the project trademark to adopt a privileged name that gives them an advantage over future competitors. Likewise they are fairly subtle with the "Instead of a small donation, we encourage you to subscribe to Home Assistant Cloud, from Nabu Casa". I think it's subtle both by not being on the front page and being one of three ways to support the foundation.

The Open Home Foundation launches

Posted Apr 24, 2024 10:54 UTC (Wed) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

They not only financially support Home Assistant, but ESPHome too. And other than the non-intrusive advertisement of their service in every Home Assistant instance, I also fail to see what devil could they be doing. I haven't read many complains about the "Cloud Home Assitant" service, either.

Worst taste ??

Posted Apr 25, 2024 7:24 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link]

Assuming you're not trolling, please tell us what actually happened.