Lowes open sources parts of IRIS code renamed to Arcus

đź’¬ Lounge
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Iris releases an Open Source Smart Home Software as “Arcus”

Iris is open sourcing portions of its smart home software and naming it Arcus. “Arcus” is the Roman name for the Greek goddess “Iris.” Iris wants the smart home enthusiast and developer communities to be able to benefit from the hard work and development of its platform software. The software will now be part of the public domain and available for the community. This release includes:

  • Public source code repositories at github.com/arcus-smart-home
  • Source code for the core platform projects as well as the user facing clients such as iOS, Android, and web
  • Documentation support to help aid members of the community on how to set up Arcus in their preferred cloud solution or locally on user machine

Now any developer can download the code and in-development builds. More advanced developers interested in contributing to the project can file bugs, participate in the community, and contribute their own fixes and enhancements to make Arcus even better.

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Funny decision after killing their platform. They might have been able to gain a larger customer base by open sourcing it in the first place.

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Possibly, but that was definitely not aligned with their strategy for Iris. It would be virtually impossible to get UL certification for professional alarm monitoring on a system that was completely open source.

To this day, as much as I despise Iris, their app was the strong point of the platform. Anyone here questioning why Hubitat doesn't need an app, should have spent some time with the Iris app.

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Too little too late.

It's a absolute shame as I always liked Iris devices.

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Not sure I believe you on that one...unless you have some sort of inside knowledge about the process. There should be no reason it couldn't be certified as long as it meets all the requirements.

Open source and closed source is really the same thing in the end, just that one of them gives more freedom to the end user (usually provided with a disclaimer or warranty void warning).

My phone is "open source" and I can modify it any time I want. I'm sure it had no problems getting all the required certifications to go to market.

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No insude knowledge just understanding what UL certification means in terms of professional monitoring. Comparing that against your phone is like comparing apples to elephants. You can't.

Receiving UL certification for professional monitoring means the call center is authorized to call emergency services police and fire on your nehalf when an alarm is tripped. The requirements are very stringent. I am not aware of a single traditional home automation system that has qualified for that, outside of ADT/SmartThings and Iris.

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What does that have to do with whether their code is open source or not?
Open source doesn't necessarily mean unsupported, just means others can look at the code and contribute.

I agree with @xamindar if they had open sourced it in the first place, they may have gathered a community like ST did and garnered a larger market share. Almost everyone would by IRIS stuff and sale and figure out how to get it working with other systems.

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I certainly would have gone the IRIS route but when I had a chat with a store clerk about IRIS future about 3 years ago he told me not to bother because he was told IRIS wasn't going to expand anymore and they didn't have the time/money to grow it. A real shame.