That's definitely better, but it's not nearly as good as if it were encrypted. That being said, I know HE doesn't give you a way to do the encryption so there's not much you can do short of trying to write your own SSL library in Groovy...
Bruce, thank you for this post on the technology end. @mitchswpt beat me to start a similar thread to this one. I would like to add to mitchswpt's question on "go the way of the Wink" and touch on legal control and your company's mission.
Looking at the situation from a legal aspect, your company retains full control of the platform. While your T&Cs are better than some of the others (my favorite from Wink is ... reserves the right to interrupt the Site ... for any reason or no reason"), your T&Cs still speaks of "revocable right to access and use the Software for Customer’s own personal use" and "Hubitat may block the use of, restrict, disallow or terminate any third-party service in its sole discretion."
These statements beg the question that if your company decides to end, divest, merge, etc., could there be any guarantees on perpetual use of the product that we have bought? Your value proposition gears enabling customers to be self-sufficient. If we ignore software maintenance patches, and one does not rely on any third-party integrations requiring external connections to the internet as well as no need of technical support, is Hubitat providing a continued service that can be terminated?
To put this in context, Wink is not only disabling customers access from their hub, but also any form of local control. Technically speaking, users could have limped along with some basic automation on gen 2 of their product without Internet access, but the company plans to disable their router altogether unless a monthly tributed is made. Interestingly enough, it appears each 'user' on the same instance of a hub would have to pay this tribute separately.
Getting to your company's mission statement: "Empower consumers to elevate their environment ... private home automation ... open platform...", if you retain full control of the software, legally revocable at any time, how truly open is it? Some legal revision or amendment for perpetual use of something we have bought for as long as the hardware operates plus pledge to open the source if in the unfortunate circumstance the company ends would go a long way.
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It is open in the sense that end users can write their own applications and device drivers. Not in the sense of "open source".
If the latter is important to you, you should consider an open source platform - like OpenHAB or Home Assistant.
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If hubitat inc. disappeared overnight, your hub would still function, in terms of devices and automations. But most (all?) integrations with other services in the cloud would not.
Like @aaiyar said it’s not an open-source project, and staff have made quite a few statements to that effect in the past. If they go bankrupt, the source code and anything else of value would presumably be sold to pay off their creditors.
Edit: if they are bought out (as opposed to going bankrupt) then I would think the platform code would be a part of that purchase, not sure why anyone would acquire them without that being a part of the deal. So same outcome in the end.
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Seems like an unfair question to ask. Samsung walks in the door tomorrow and offers them $1 billion to sell and give them full rights. Samsung says they want to turn off local control. You expect this guys to put in writing they will turn down that billion dollar offer?
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In that situation I wonder if they might even contemplate remotely disabling everyone's hub before anyone knew what was happening, if that's what Samsung demanded (assuming that's even possible from a technical perspective). There's a lot of things I would consider doing for a billion dollars that I would not under many other circumstances.
Given the way that things have ended up at Wink, it seems the only thing that would satisfy some of their users (who are understandably wary about something similar ever happening to them again) is a completely open source home automation platform? If it's open source, then there's always someone out there that could continue development work.
Short of that, there is always a risk of a commercial product/service going away with customers left holding the bag.
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One of the problems I am noticing is that some people seem to want the conveniece/ease-of-use that wink provided, with the assurances of perpetual platform development that open source offers.
Not sure both of those goals can be prioritized.
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This thread has gone sideways into speculative la-la land.
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