Hi,
Is it possible to start a company that installs home automation systems which use openHAB software as the core code and IoT devices and sensors from branded manufacturers such as Belkin WeMo, Philips Hue, etc?
Is it possible legally?
And are there any companies that already have started this business?
Note that I have read @Kai 's topic The Road Ahead - Reintegrating ESH but I could not find the answer to my question.
Waiting for your valuable help
@Kai owns the OpenHAB name. He has fielded similar questions previously.
Companies that used ESH did not want to contribute but it is still there if your company wishes to.
@alimazin You might want to read through Openhab for business purposes?, which is still pretty much to the point if you replace ESH by “openHAB Core” in there. As @Bruce_Osborne mentioned, you must not use the openHAB name as part of your solution and you must not refer your users to the openHAB community for support or other things. Using the code within your solution (while respecting what the EPLv2 asks from you) is perfectly fine.
The [quote=“Kai, post:3, topic:83013”]
you must not use the openHAB name as part of your solution and you must not refer your users to the openHAB community for support or other things
[/quote]
Does this also apply to someone who tries to distribute a more friendly installation experience?
There is a project called Sarah doing that and using the OH name and community.
I think what the op is looking to do is to install and configure stock OH unchanged. The business would be a services business, not a software business. Does a business that provides the service of installing and configuring OH unchanged also need to change the names and branding to do so? I think that is the Crux of the question.
For something like that (or Sarah) we as a community should not be expected to support configuration & design decisions made by people other than the users experiencing issues.
Those who made those decisions and chose to market them, for profit or not, need to setup a support infrastructure for those decisions. Do not throw that on us here.
SARAH is just some web stuff built on top of openHABian. It’s really no big deal. If rather he have submitted it to OH as an extension of OH rather than as something separate, but at the end of the day it’s pretty much stock openHABian with a web based configuration generator not wholly unlike HomeBuilder. And both openHABian and HomeBuilder started life as external projects as well. Finally SARAH is FOSS and not a commercial ebdeavor so I think it doesn’t quite for work the OP’s use case.