I just wanted to shout out TRMNL.
They have an interesting product, and they’re trying to build a business that includes a lot of open source aspects.
The device that they sell is proprietary, but it’s also just an ESP32, screen, enclosure, and battery, with a custom PCB for convenience. They plan to add instructions to build your own device, and their firmware is open source under a GPLv3 license.
By default, their device connects to their servers, and they have a slick web configuration tool for people who don’t care about having smart devices call home, but you can easily modify the firmware to connect to your own self-hosted server instead. As of this evening, both the Phoenix and Sinatra server implementations are open source under an MIT license after I pointed out that they had no license in an issue, and they pretty much immediately updated the repositories.
There are two other repositories that they have not added a license to, but given their swift response, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and I would expect them to be updated shortly.
They have not shared all of the plugins that are available on their hosted service for use on a self-hosted instance, but a few are available for use and there are many plugins made by others available as well!
As soon as they update those last two repositories, I plan to pre-order one (unlike the conceptually cool VU Dials who’s creators still have not added a license even after being called out by the co-creator of Rocky Linux).
I think you’re not seeing my point. This is in the hardware. It’s simple to have a setting that defaults to connecting to the company’s server and then have that setting allow for changing the sever target. Why do I need to build firmware to do that?
And, no, it’s not acceptable to require forking, regardless of the ease of merging. It still means you won’t get critical security updates without manual intervention.
And finally, it’s requiring trust. If the company decides to change the license, you are out of luck. And again, the documentation and policies are already lacking, like what happens if your API key is compromised? Do you need to pay for a new one to be generated. These are on your local device.
And no, home assistant doesn’t require self-hosting. It requires hardware to put the central system on, but doesn’t require an external server for web services. This device is putting the lock inside the hardware you are purchasing. If I purchase hardware, I want it to be mine. Not subject to a license of what you can put on it, even if that license is initially very open. It’s my hardware.
Home assistant does sell hardware that is totally open with no license on what software you can put on it. Most people put it on their own hardware. This is totally separate from the cloud service they offer which is for interacting with the sever over the internet and some other stuff. That cloud functionality is totally optional and you aren’t required to modify the home assistant code base in order to NOT use the cloud. So it’s not at all equivalent.
Even if you don’t have external access to Home Assistant, you’re still hosting it to your local network by yourself