Hi Benny,
As the founder of openHAB let me try to answer your questions from my perspective:
openHAB is done by and for the community and in contrast to any commercial solution, it is positioned to be free and totally open. There are definitely no plans to commercialise openHAB in any way.
I understand that setting up the system is tedious and it would be nice to get it pre-packaged with a hardware. Actually, there is such an offer: RED Brick now with openHAB and Nagios | Tinkerforge, but you will notice that it is only interesting for Makers, not for end users.
As written in Internet of Things ==> Openhab Should be Intranet of things - #3 by Kai, I rather see openHAB efforts to provide images and containers that could be installed on different hardware boards. You might then get pre-installed SD cards with a RaspPi and a case for example in the end.
I think that is as far as it goes for openHAB regarding a “product packaging” - it will rather be a DIY package for a jump start, not a home automation end user product as such.
If a company would want to sell openHAB as a product, there were quite some obstacles:
- Even if you have software installed on the hardware, you still have to configure you system, which means browsing the wiki, editing textual files and swearing a lot (so I was told ;-)). This is not really “mass” compatible, right?
- You would have to support this product. How could you guarantee that bindings work? With which devices exactly? etc. I would not want to work in the call center of such a company
- You will need to update it remotely, so you need cloud infrastructure etc.
- Some of the code in openHAB has been implemented by reverse engineering protocols - this might cause some legal risks when being used commercially, while it is usually fine to use for private purposes.
That’s why my recommendation for commercially interested companies is to build an own solution on top of Eclipse SmartHome: The Eclipse Foundation makes sure that the code is clean and good to be used in commercial offerings. It gives companies the chance to do their own branding, while participating from the developments of others - it is a neutral place for collaboration, even with potential competitors. You will find some of my reasoning at Kai Kreuzer: openHAB 2.0 and Eclipse SmartHome.
Best regards,
Kai