Re: Open Source

[Karl Denninger <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Kearney wrote:
>> Zensys can bite me
>
> Ah, and with that attitude you're certainly likely to encourage change...
> not.

I don't give a fuck about change in attitudes.

If you know anything about me and my history, you know that what I care
about is results.

As I said, its trivially easy to reverse-engineer what I need to know in
nearly all cases, and for those where its not, I'm perfectly happy to
call people out in public and blast them mercilessly and recommend that
people NOT buy their stuff.

Home Automation has been cursed with incompatible and undocumented
proprietary crap for twenty years.  The reason X10 developed such a
following, even though it fundamentally sucks rocks through a hose, is
that the protocol is relatively clean and available to anyone who wants
to use it.

ZWave has tremendous promise at the underlying technical level, in that
it solves 90% of what made X10 suck:

1. It has two-way communication (e.g. you can POLL devices to see what
state they're in)

2. It confirms command reception at the time of transmission, and tells
you if the RF transmission was successful or not.  This allows your
software to only update the state of a device IF the request reached the
target.

3. It supports (although not all devices implement) notification of
local changes (e.g. user pushes a wall switch.)  This allows
instantaneous knowledge of a local change.

4. It is considerably faster and X10 and, with sufficient device
density, it is also vastly more reliable.

ZWave's biggest flaw is that it cannot "span" significant distances as
the transmitter power is simply too low.  This means it is useless to,
for example, control the lights on a dock as the dock is likely beyond
the RF range of the closest other device.

That sucks, but it is what it is.

When the response to someone who is publishing FREEWARE to "pay me", my
answer is "fuck you."

I don't publish Home Automation software for money.  If HomeDaemon was a
  commercial product, or I had any intention of making it a commercial
product, then I'd see this differently - the cost of the SDK and data
definitions could easily be rolled into the cost of doing business.

But HomeDaemon has been freely accessible, in source, for nearly 10
years.  Clearly, my intent is NOT to make a business out of this.


--
Karl Denninger (karl@xxxxxxxxxxxxx)
http://www.denninger.net