The world of smart homes, home automation, or Smart Home, is receiving an important boost from open source technology. And to manage all this, a new non-profit organization has been established, the Open Home Foundation, which will be responsible for driving and managing more than 240 projects, as well as drivers, libraries and open source standards crucial for smart home functionality. This includes popular names like Home Assistant, ESPHome, Zigpy, Piper, Z-Wave JS, WLED, Rhasspy, and Zigbee2MQTT, among many others.
The main objective of the foundation is safeguarding the future of open source smart home technology. This means protecting these projects from several potential threats:
- Surveillance capitalism: The Open Home Foundation aims to prevent smart homes from becoming tools for data collection and manipulation.
- Acquisitions: By centralizing these projects under a nonprofit umbrella, the foundation reduces the risk of them being acquired by commercial entities with potentially conflicting interests.
- Abandonment- Open source projects can sometimes fall behind if their developers lose interest or resources. The foundation ensures continued development and maintenance, and even provides funding to ensure sustainability through donations, memberships, and strategic partnerships.
The founder of Nabu Casa and also the leader of the Open Home Foundation, has highlighted that both will be separated in roles. While the foundation is a non-profit development initiative, Nabu Casa (company behind Home Assistant) will continue in its same role providing commercial services. That is to say, the new structure It has a clear division:
- Open Home Foundation- Manages and develops open source software for smart homes, ensuring its long-term sustainability and advocating for privacy and user choice.
- Nabu House- Provides commercial services and hardware products that complement the open source software ecosystem.
This will provide great benefits for users finals, with higher quality projects, with a more prosperous ecosystem for smart homes, guaranteeing greater user control, privacy and a solid foundation.