Hi Metin, Ando & Tim,
Congrats on founding your company, it is great to see people being passionate about openHAB and even decide to do a living on it!
Let me just comment on a few things. I am not meaning to de-rail you in any way, but to make sure you are following the right tracks. Note that IANAL, so don’t take that as a legal advice, but rather seek professional legal assistance for questions that you might have to clarify.
Let me first point to this comment that I made a few years ago. In short, I see two ways of building a business wrt openHAB:
- “Around openHAB”: Provide pre-packaged versions, bundled with hardware, professional services (installation, setup, maintainance, etc). Effectively, you are not selling openHAB (or a product at all), but you are offering services for it.
- “On top of openHAB”: You build a product (software and/or hardware) that you are selling and for which you have to provide warranty, support, etc. and in which you are using code from openHAB. Most likely you will restrict the software, so that people are not able to do everything they read about here in the forum, because you wouldn’t be able to provide warranty & reliable support anymore.
So (1) is clearly about openHAB as a solution, so it is fine to use the “openHAB” name, refer to the discussion forum here for support and in general help to grow the community, because the efforts make openHAB accessible to a wider audience.
For (2), my clear advice (as mentioned in the linked comment) is to build a product based on Eclipse SmartHome (not calling it “based on openHAB”). The result will be a solution similar to openHAB, but still different to it - as you will have your own user-friendly setup UIs, a constrained set of supported add-ons, etc. As you can see here, there are already such offers on the market. Ideally, such solutions should contribute their improvements back, so that everyone else (including openHAB) benefits from it. As an example, the vast majority of the code of the Paper UI is a contribution from QIVICON in order to have the possibility to do setup&configuration through a UIs. Without this, openHAB would most likely still be fully driven through textual configurations only.
From what I understand, OMNI-Q falls into the (2) category. It thus does not directly address the openHAB community, but rather wants to build a customer base of non-technical users, which might be partially sourced from the openHAB community (so effectively removing them from openHAB, while keeping them in the “ESH-based solution” user group). It is a solution similar to, but not identical to openHAB. It would imho perfectly fit in the list of ESH solution references.
If you like, we can discuss this all over a beer at the next Smart Home Day in Ludwigsburg - I hope you are joining it as well and I’d love to see your hardware prototypes then .
Regards,
Kai