The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together.
It’s entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa.
It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn’t want to be Alexa or Google Assistant.
All of the project’s ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits.
Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.
Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects.
So Schoutsen, Ben Bangert, and Pascal Vizeli founded Nabu Casa, a for-profit firm intended to stabilize funding and paid work on Home Assistant.
But Home Assistant was “floating in a kind of undefined space between a for-profit entity and an open-source repository on GitHub,” according to the foundation.
Up until recently, Home Assistant was a vague and expansive project.
All of your devices should be connected together by the open smart home platform, an open source operating system that you can run anywhere. Moreover, it has custom Raspberry Pi hardware in green and yellow colors. Nabu Casa, a private cloud services company, provides funding for it in addition to being completely free. It includes the small board project ESPHome as well as additional linked components. Although it aspires to be a voice assistant with many uses, it is not interested in becoming Google Assistant or Alexa. There’s a lot to Home Assistant.
But now that an announcement was made over the weekend, it’s a little simpler to outline Home Assistant’s design. The Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that currently houses Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits, is now responsible for all of the project’s goals. Regarding the current state of open source projects, its mission statement is both refreshing and refreshingly honest.
“The Open Home Foundation says in a press release that we’ve done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware.”. In a way, this safeguard even covers our future selves, allowing smart home owners to continue to reap the benefits for many years, if not decades. Whatever happens. The foundation aims to support and work with outside projects that are important to Home Assistant, such as Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT, in addition to staying financially stable and safe from buyouts or mission creep.
Yet, Home Assistant has goals beyond wealth and positions on boards. With regard to three main principles, they seek to “be an active political advocate” in the smart home space.
Devices with local-only options and cloud services that require explicit permissions are examples of data privacy.
Choice in how devices interact with one another via local APIs and open standards.
sustainability through extending the life of outdated electronics and appliances beyond what the manufacturer specifies.
A foundation from a few lines of Python.
Paulus Schoutsen, the creator of Home Assistant, created a Python script shortly before 2014 in order to have more control over his Philips Hue smart lights. After thousands of volunteer contributions, Home Assistant was starting to take shape. Inevitably, the “free time” coding and pressing bug fixes began to wear Schoutsen and the other volunteers down. Thus, Nabu Casa was established by Schoutsen, Ben Bangert, and Pascal Vizeli as a for-profit company with the goal of securing funding and providing compensation for Home Assistant work.
Home Assistant would be able to take full responsibility for projects like ESPHome, allocate full-time labor to them, and formally contribute to open standards like Matter, Z-Wave, and Zigbee thanks to that stability. However, the foundation claims that Home Assistant was “floating in a kind of undefined space between a for-profit entity and an open-source repository on GitHub.”. In order to more clearly distinguish between the business and non-profit sides, the Open Home Foundation establishes the formal home for everything that requires it and designates Nabu Casa as a “special, rules-bound inaugural partner.”.
Like a box from Home Depot for Home Assistant?
In an interview with Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of The Verge and during a State of the Open Home stream this past weekend, Schoutsen further proposed that the Foundation provide Home Assistant with a more firm foundation on which to compete with the industry’s biggest players, such as Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung. This year, Home Assistant-branded extension dongles and starter hardware with a green badge will be available on Amazon. Before the year ends, a specialized voice control hardware device that makes a local voice assistant possible will be released. In order to help local assistants become more efficient, quick, and simple to integrate into a locally controlled smart home, Home Assistant has partnered with Nvidia and their Jetson edge AI platform.
This implies that Home Assistant is expanding as a brand in addition to a product. The “Works With” initiative from Home Assistant is expanding and aims high. Schoutsen said to Tuohy, “We want to be a consumer brand.”. “It should be possible for you to enter a Home Depot and decide, ‘I need this smart home hub because I care about my privacy,'”. ‘”.
It’s hard to imagine Home Assistant dropping its advanced automation tools and YAML-editing offerings entirely, so where does that leave current Home Assistant enthusiasts—who are probably accustomed to the feeling of a tech brand pivoting away from them? However, Schoutsen hinted that he could see a future in which regular and “advanced” users would be divided. However, the open architecture of Home Assistant and its current foundation should guarantee that users can always remix, reorganize, or re-release the smart home option of their choice.
