I am not using Ubiquiti gear at the moment but am planning to based on other peoples positive experiences. I was also considering home-assistant, but OpenHab somehow seemed more robust solution (not sure if word “serious solution” could fit here). However it is easy to notice how fast home-assistant is developing (is it the python thing, not sure).
But if I move all my network to Ubiquiti platform, and they manage to make some super easy/reliable/practical integration, perhaps integrating home-assistant inside router or something even better, would I be wrong to consider moving automation platform as well to home-assistant?
What do you guys think, could openhab get some benefit from this hiring thing? Perhaps Ubiquiti gear could be more open to integration with openhab as well, or perhaps even hosting OpenHab instead of home-assistant, or… ?
Just ranting, but very interested in other peoples opinions.
My opinion is that they only hired him as they want to expand into new areas and it will guarantee x amount of sales instantly on any new product releases due to the large user base of HASS. Smart move and everyone wins that uses HASS as any product they need that the users want can be created and work very well. A business is always looking how it helps their profits not how it helps a open source project. That is just the marketing spin.
As for should u move to HASS I think the best advice is stay with the platform that is closest to your programming language of choice. I know C, so a platform based on java works for me. If you do not know any languages then…
No one is ever wrong for looking at new platforms and considering whether they meet your needs better than what you are currently using. You just have to weight the cost of the move in time and lost productivity (i.e. time where your home automation is not working) against the perceived gains you will get by the move (support for new hardware, ability to eliminate a box from your configuration, etc).
Everyone’s assessment will be different.
If someone wants to hire someone to develop OH or ESH that would be awesome. It has happened before (I believe PaperUI was originally developed by a commercial developer) and it was one of the drivers behind separating the core of OH into its own project under the Eclipse Foundation to make that easier from a legal and intellectual property persepctive.
When you look at all the large and successful open source projects you will find that a large portion of them are successful because they have a small cadre of developers who are actively paid by their company to develop on the open source project. So I suspect, assuming Ubiquiti continues supporting this development it will be good for home-assistant in the long run. Of course, Ubiquiti could drop it at any time and that could be catastrophic for home-assistant.
I doubt OH will get much direct benefit from this. In fact, if they are successful there might be fewer people who seek to migrate off of home-assistant to OH. But I also don’t think it will have too much of an impact. Ubiquiti stuff is expensive.
I do agree, they probably hired the developer to essentially buy the userbase of home-assistant. It remains to be seen whether they will turn the free opensource version into a second class citizan (community edition anyone?) or whether they will fully invest in it.
I disagree about whether the language that either product is written in should be a driver in your choice as to which one to use. Unless you plan on developing on the product itself, what should be your primary driver is how easy is the product to use for you and does it support everything you need it to support?
