[balloob]

Founder Home Assistant here. Want to chime in that I always love to see write ups like these to see the great things what people achieve with Home Assistant.

Not everyone might know, but last year we started the Open Home Foundation as a non-profit in Switzerland and I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

We are fully committed to building out a smart home that focuses on local control and privacy. Yes there are rough edges, but we're actively working on it in the open, with progress being released every month.

~Paulus, Founder Home Assistant & President Open Home Foundation https://github.com/balloob

[1]: https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/announcing-the-open-...

[diggan]

> I donated Home Assistant to it[1]. It's fully funded by users. There are no investors involved.

I cannot thank you enough for this. It was a bit risky adopting Home Assistant for everything ~two years ago, but that you guys did this move really makes me feel less scared about eventually having to replace it with something else.

I'm subscribed to Home Assistant Cloud (via Nabu Casa) even though I don't use it just because it seems to be one of the few ways to financially support you, is there any way of doing one time donations to the foundation itself?

[balloob]

We don't want to come to rely on donations and have to show Wikipedia-style beg banners in our app (I would personally hate to see that myself).

So with the limited resources that we have, we currently only consider bigger donations valued $10k or more. We've had monetary donations from DuckDuckGo and Espressif so far.

[magicalhippo]

I didn't get the begging feeling from using Blender, though it has been some years ago. IIRC they focused on donations for specific features and showpieces like their movies.

As a very happy Home Assistant user, hopefully you can manage something similar so you have enough money to stay afloat and keep up the good work.

[bonzini]

Maybe you could allow people to pay more for Nabu Casa?

[Blankono]

beg banners or awareness campaign.

I never had issues with that.

[hiatus]

It seems that's the only way according to their "support us" page.

https://www.openhomefoundation.org/organization/#support-our...

[cyberax]

Is it possible to donate to your foundation via some kind of a subscription?

I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.

[baby_souffle]

> I have a Nabu Casa subscription, but I don't really need it.

Shame there’s no way to donate it.

[lolinder]

I mean, if you're paying for the subscription but never use it that's effectively a donation, right?

OP explains their motivation for not accepting small donations in another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44014822

[pabs3]

I think baby_souffle might have meant a way to donate the subscription to someone else.

[lolinder]

Ah, that makes sense. My brain inserted a "to" before "it".

[farawayea]

Do you plan to fix https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend/issues/18549?

[devwastaken]

smart homes dont work because wifi doesnt work. almost every user is running low quality hardware or does not deploy a meshing AP to reach the devices. the devices are not resilient to lost packets and high latency

just change a wifi ssid with smart devices in a home and watch it all crumble. users want nothing more than to get rid of “smart” once they realize its not smart enough to figure out how to change wifi networks.

endless “updates”, rent seeking, breaking changes, account setup - its not worth it.

[alwa]

You should check out Home Assistant and the vast range of ecosystems it integrates with! There a dazzling range of radio standards and manufacturers that have considered the problems you’re describing.

You could (and I understand many people do) run an entire smart home without any WiFi at all, if you’d like.

Home Assistant is free and open-source, and I understand from his comment above that their founder generously donated the project to a non-profit foundation to sustain it that way for the future.

Which is awfully reassuring with respect to the rent-seeking incentives you’re worried about.

[stavros]

You don't have to use WiFi, this whole argument is just invalid. Use Zigbee instead.

[magicalhippo]

Only my "smart" water heater communicates over wifi. The rest use Z-wave or Zigbee. I know at least Z-wave has from the start had the ability for devices to be programmed to operate without the controller.

So if the controller falls out or you don't have one you can still have your buttons toggle lights etc. Controller or no controller, in either case it works just fine without wifi.

[XorNot]

Who is "just" changing their Wifi SSIDs?

Like my parents wifi SSID was set when I was in high school and 20 years later it's the same.

But if it did change, all the devices just setup a temporary AP and wait to be told the new one and the password (the temporary AP is also password protected).

[Hikikomori]

There are WiFi alternatives.

[Calwestjobs]

when you last complained about Torvalds rent seeking lol.