Use the Marketplace to share add-ons with other openHAB users.
Community Marketplace Contributing Rules (Nov. 2, 2021)
The Community Marketplace is provided to everyone with a simple goal in mind: become a great resource to add functionality to their openHAB system and profit from the what the community has to offer, complementing the openHAB project itself.
We want it to be both fair to contributors and trustworthy for end users.
Therefore, as stewards of this community.openhab.org forum which acts as the Marketplace’s technical platform, we (the openHAB Foundation) have come up with some “common sense” rules for what we deem acceptable or not when contributing new Marketplace entries.
Please abide by them when you submit a new contribution, and also remain aware that new contributions might lead to a new assessment of these rules, leading to adjustments and modifications over time. Older submissions’ acceptability when contradicting a new rule will be reassessed when appropriate. While we trust the community to do the right thing and publish entries in good faith, know that there is no guarantee that they will stay if they violate the Marketplace rules. Serious or repeated offenses might lead to a revocation of publishing rights of the offending account in the Marketplace, or (in extreme cases) an outright ban.
The current rules are as follows:
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No malicious, misleading, objectionable, offensive or illegal activities
- An add-on shall not run unrelated background processes without the user’s knowledge and consent, such as cryptocurrency mining.
- An add-on shall not surreptitiously try to discover passwords or private data on the host system.
- An add-on shall not upload data to the Internet other than for its explicit intended purpose - for instance, transmitting latitude/longitude, region, usage data, logs & traces, system information or uncaught exceptions for analytics or data mining is prohibited; location-specific add-ons, such as weather services, can however transmit the configured location to retrieve local data. Exceptions can be granted in limited circumstances after approval (send a motivated request via PM to @staff).
- An add-on shall not, unbeknownst to the user, alter or negatively impact the functionality of the host system or the openHAB runtime, such as intentionally crippling or disabling features or performance
- An add-on shall not, after it has been installed and while it is running, execute (or schedule the execution of) arbitrary code retrieved remotely from a server that the user doesn’t control; exceptions can be granted in limited circumstances after approval (send a motivated request via PM to @staff).
- An add-on shall not include hidden functionality to remotely take control of the host system in any capacity (e.g. provide a “backdoor”).
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Free and open source software only, no violations of 3rd party binary or source licensing
- The source code of all add-ons must be available.
- The source code must be licensed under an OSI approved license (preferably EPL).
- If the add-on or parts of it is a derivative work, and the original code is covered by a license that includes provisions regarding derivative works (such as the GPL), you are expected to comply with these provisions in full.
- Make sure you have the rights to use all materials and assets that you include in your add-on or its description, for example, images, icons and other media.
- An add-on shall not require a license key or registration, regardless of whether it involves payment or not, in order to provide its full functionality (no “trial” or “freemium” versions), nor include a time-limited “trial period”. It shall not advertise that there is another version available with more functionality. However, to support their development effort, individual authors may ask for funding, donations or patronage in the add-on description, provided it is made clear that it remains not compulsory.
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Respect the work of the openHAB project and others, and keep the add-on store easy to navigate
- When you base your contribution on someone else’s work, make sure you obtain permission and/or at the very least properly credit the original author.
- Publishing add-ons that compete directly with an official add-on is not allowed; by “compete” we mean “forks” or alternative implementations offering similar functionality.
- Exemption to the previous rule: If you are the current maintainer/code owner of an official add-on, you can publish a beta version of the same add-on to the marketplace if you state clearly that it is not the official version. Make a prominent (BETA) mention in the title so as to not confuse the marketplace version with the official version. A link to the pull request with the upcoming changes to the official add-on has to be provided in the post. Once the pull request has been merged and the binding is widely available, the author will be responsible for unpublishing the beta version from the marketplace.
- Your contribution must be significantly different from other submissions (no copycats with minor changes). You are encouraged to work together as a community instead of proliferating multiple confusingly similar versions of the same thing.
- The contribution’s title or description must not ostensibly advertise or promote another home automation solution than openHAB, or an alternative distribution to the official openHAB distribution.