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by zzyzxd 510 days ago
What's the HA community's attitude towards FOSS nowadays? Comparing to 3.5 years ago?[1]

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27505277

2 comments

FWIW frenk clarified that their issues was not licensing, but support.

> For me, this was not about licensing specifically. However, that point unfortunately is missed and got lost. Which is unfortunate. A lot blew up on the route, which just sucks for both parties.

> In the end, I think the way this project distributes Home Assistant (and its integrations, including Ambee) is not providing the intended working and thus may surprise the end user. In the end, those users are likely to knock on the doors of the Home Assistant project and their integration maintainers, not this project. As a matter of fact, most of my packages in this project are outdated and don't match the distributed version of Home Assistant.

That's why I asked about attitude, not anything else. It's perfectly fine to decide to not to support someone, but...

"I release my code under FOSS license, but if anyone distribute it in a way I consider not nice, I will re-license it just to screw them over." [1]

When I was considering using HA and was casually browsing community discussions, there were many posts gave me similar feeling like above case. There were other technical reasons that I decided to not to use HA, but this certainly left a really bad taste in my mouth.

1. https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/126326#issuecomment-86...

Wow, one active contributor is now "the community"?
This isn't some regular contributor. They appear to be one of the most important Home Assistant maintainers and a Nabu casa employee. This contributor is also the author of many release note blog posts such as this one https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2025/01/03/release-20251/

Home Assistant may be developed with financing from Nabu Casa. Nabu Casa receives money from partners, from people who buy their products and from those who pay for their cloud subscription. They also rely heavily on countless other Python packages developed and maintained by people they don't pay. Other people make significant contributions to Home Assistant and to its web UI.

I'd expect them to run this project as an open source project and handle such situations with a bit more grace, even more so for someone with such a high profile such as frenck.

They'd have the right to get angry if someone distributed a paid product which didn't include FOSS code from third party contributors or FOSS dependencies. This isn't the case. They use a lot of FOSS code from countless people already for the Home Assistant core, for the frontend and for the Home Assistant OS.

All of the time spent dealing with such needless drama could be better spent living one's life and doing something more meaningful for everyone.

I only linked to the HN thread, but there you can find links to discussions in HA community, for example: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi... , which includes responses from forum admins and founders.
I’ve read that whole thing back when it happened.