The same could be said for Asia as well, where pretty sure zigbee is the dominant protocol due to Xiaomi et al.
Problem in Asia is that there are 1000 diferent brand zigbee hubs, all costing next to nothing.
By that do you mean that is not the case in the EU? As in it is a saturated market in Asia, but in the EU there is very little?
Less, not little.
In the EU there are more privacy concerns, so alot of cheap china hubs are discarded here.
I think it was a logical step. On the minus side it may reduce the opportunity for new driver or app would-be coders to learn from examples. On the plus side it is an excellent way to mainstream the Hubitat system as it will encourage adoption by professional smart home installation companies, as they can add value. Of slightly more benefit to the Hubitat company than to hobbyist users like myself, but I don't begrudge it.
I still don't see most of the prolific dev's branching out into the commercial space..... At least I hope not. 
I know I would view my "work" in this space very differently if I expected people to pay for my services. I'd have to change the hours (and other habits) I keep when working on my "products". My choices of projects would need to be judged very differently.... Perhaps for the better....
"Slight Smiles" aside, I don't feel the addition of this feature in 2.3.0 is something that diminishes or changes in any way the way most hobbyist developers will approach their "work". Most have developed their code in response to their own needs or a general interest in developing the solution. I know I get a kick out of expanding my own knowledge and working with the enthusiastic Community members, without the limitations financial considerations impose. I'm happy for other larger industries to pay for my parcel of Aus....
Just my opinion...
I can think of one developer who is probably dancing up and down for joy about this change! But he's a developer who's code I would never use anyway.
I agree. I do also work on software for a living. It's a very different world when there are paying customers. Sometimes with my work here someone reports a bug. It's one that's super hard to track down or rare enough that I'm just not super interested in fixing it. When someone is a paying customer though, that's a big harder to do.
Yup. This is exactly why I've built just about everything I have. It was something I wanted and I decided to share it. Sometimes I don't. I have a few apps I've built that I've kept just for me. Some wouldn't be useful to anyone else and other ones that probably would be, but I didn't feel like supporting.
A couple of things though about this feature. I believe @bravenel that this wasn't about commercial apps. If it was, it's a pretty terrible implementation! Why? Well it just relies on a Zip file password. So you go and buy one of my apps and post the password online. Boom free for everyone else! To build out a commercial app system you'd need a whole store which is not what this is and they've said they're not planning to build. There's a right way to build out an app store (Microsoft, Apple, Google have already done this successfully, no need to reinvent the wheel, do what they did!), and the wrong way -- this is the wrong way. So based on that, it sounds like that wasn't the goal.
What I did express and what does concern me is that this is a security concern. The use case the HE team is talking about is one thing. That said, this WILL be used by some devs who just want to hide their code from the community (like the one guy I alluded to who is known for posting inflammatory comments both here and on the ST forums accusing people of stealing his code and such, threatening lawsuits, etc.). I like that I can review the source code for an app/driver and determine whether it is safe. I mean think for a moment, we're using this system to lock/unlock our doors, open garage doors, etc. Knowing some code could be allowing someone to do that remotely is scary. Right now I can look through the code and see someone isn't doing that. With closed source I can't. I know what you're thinking "ok so you never install stuff on your PC that's closed source?" Of course I do! But I also run virus scanners on my PC, spyware scanners, etc. Also, I rely on the fact that security researchers are checking a lot of these apps too. Remember, unlike with Hubitat on Windows I can monitor all network traffic on my PC to see what's going on. I can take memory dumps to see what an application is doing. I can query the OS to find out what kinds of things the app is doing (does it listen on a port? Did it write files to disk? Etc.). I can't do that stuff on Hubitat. So I just have to trust.
I'm not generally a trusting person, so I like to trust, but verify by looking at the code myself 
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This isn't the whole story...
There's a Bundle and there's Pro Bundles. In the Bundle case, you can optionally pw protect the ZIP and then the pw must be distributed along with the ZIP. That means, as you say, the pw is rather useless.
Pro Bundles are different. The pw and url to the ZIP is given to Hubitat, they paste it into their cloud DB. Done. The developer then distributes the URL and the hub will invisibly retrieve the pw from Hubitat's cloud.
But how does a developer test? They build a ZIP with a pw and use the Bundle path to verify that it installs. They never distribute the pw outside of their own test process. Once it's working, they use the Pro Bundle path.
In my opinion, regular Bundles won't be distributed with PW, because there's no significant value. Regular bundles will be pw-less ZIPs. Equally, Pro Bundles will never distribute a PW either, there's not even a place to paste it in.
I'm certain that someone will build a ZIP with pw and put both out on GitHub without thinking it through. Humans after all.
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Yeah. But again, this isn't a store. Show me the form where I submit my app to be approved for this process? How do I set my price and guarantee I get paid before Hubitat approves it? Nothing about the way this was built is designed to support an app store model or commercially available apps. That's kind of my point. As designed it supports the use case they've mentioned, partnerships with people who want to sell a Hubitat and install proprietary apps, not people who want to commercialize their community apps.
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I haven't tried to partner with Hubitat and commercialize anything so I too have not seen the forms that would accompany that transaction. That does not mean it doesn't exist, just that we aren't privy to it. There are commercial products for Hubitat and therefore those developers were satisfied enough with the forms and process to agree to distribute their work.
I imagine they are looking at ProBundle as a way of uncoupling their development from Hubitat's release cycle. The downside is that their products wouldn't be found under "Add Built-in".
You're missing my point completely. I'm not asking whether or not there is paperwork to become a paid app partner. I'm saying, I decide I want HPM to be $5.00. So I get a probundle setup that's pre-authorized and can be installed. How do I get my $5 before someone installs it? Anyone who knows the URL can install my app for free because Hubitat will look up that password in the DB and apply it. So my question is, explain to me how this actually promotes the idea of commercialization of apps? If that was their goal, they did it very poorly. More likely they're just telling the truth and their goal is to allow partners to hide source code from prying eyes which I can completely understand. I was actually building some Hubitat apps for a company (coincidentally also in Australia!) and we needed a way to try to hide the source code since it was our commercial IP. Something like this would have been perfect. But we never had any plans to distribute our apps publically, it was for a commercial product that we were bundling Hubitat as part of.
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You're right, I missed your point.
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This is 100% our motivation. There is nothing here intended to support a store-like commercial app business, nor do we have any plans to pursue that as a business.
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This, 100% agree, and I do.
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I have to admit here a selfish reason why I like as many open source stuff as possible.
As a relative beginner, (a real newbie to this type of programming), I really learn a lot by looking at peoples code. I find it fascinating, and very instructive. There are some really great programmers here...
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