• Captain Janeway@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Thermostats are easy to change out. So this isn’t a huge deal. But I don’t love the idea that tech isn’t built to be self-hosted or maintained in any meaningful way. If you’re not shipping an open source version of your software when you close up, you’re an asshole.

    Yeah, self hosting isn’t for most lay people if it’s just a GitHub repo. But GitHub repos quickly become adopted by nerds like me who build tooling around it that eventually let lay people self host software with the click of a button.

    • AbidanYre@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, self hosting isn’t for most lay people if it’s just a GitHub repo…

      If ecobee put their backend code on GitHub, I bet it would be self hostable with docker within a week.

    • kevincox@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      It is also nice that these just degrade to regular thermostats. It isn’t like they are completely stopping working. It would be nice if you could swap out the API, or they keep the API running longer (how much work can maintaining it be?). But this sounds like a pretty graceful degradation.

      It would be nice to have these speak some common Zigbee protocol or similar. But this isn’t the worst behaviour I have seen from companies.

    • Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Are you aware of a decent number of mainstream products that didn’t go full asshole? I agree with you absolutely, but I feel like the majority of connected products pull this same shit.

    • GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      This is pretty much what happened with HomeAssistant. Tying all the integrations together in one platform.

      It’s now at the stage of “copy these files to a pi/buy this box we make”

      The overall aim is to integrate most open things, and find ways to work with/around more closed off products.

      !homeassistant@lemmy.world