Rboy apps - Port to Hubitat

LOL. Makes me yearn for another season of What We Do In The Shadows.

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Fair enough, I'll ding them again.

It's beyond frustrating, especially when you don't know who to be frustrated with lol

I guarantee you that @RBoy knows whom to approach if they wish to do so.

I hear you. And I'll reiterate that the evidence indicates Hubitat to have successfully reached agreements with multiple commercial vendors.

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I am also a licensee of RBoys apps and drivers before I jumped to Hubitat....

Hubitat will not release their source for the drivers and apps they support like Smartthings did. Why should RBoy be required to any more than they do? As it turns out, if I license the code from RBoy and modify it for Hubitat for my personal use, Hubitat has nothing to do with it. Maybe I am missing a hidden clause in Hubitats licensing, but I am permitted to create my own code and have ported drivers and apps from Smartthings as the documentation tells you how to get over the major differences. I do not know what RBoy needs from Hubitat over what is available to us now. That is between them. I would think Hubitat would like to expand market share by luring more Smartthing customers by supporting willing developers. @RBoy, I support you!

I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. Hubitat isn’t requiring commercial developers like RBoy to release their code for free. Far from it.

Correct. But it used to be that the RBoy Apps license prevented you from doing that. That may still be the case - I don’t know, I haven’t looked at their license in a while.

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We have in the works (no date yet) an app/driver store, where developers will be able to sell their apps and drivers, and if they want, NOT release the source code.

One of the problems that is very common is when people modify the source code of an app or driver and mess it up. It's a support nightmare for all involved, because how is one supposed to know what is modified and what is not modified -- they look the same on the surface. This is one of the reasons we have not released our driver sources.

Haha, now someone is going to say the ST released their DTH sources and didn't have this problem. Except, they didn't have to deal with support costs, or positive cash flow, or the sort of real world problems that happen to small companies without Samsung's balance sheet. Plus, I'm pretty sure ST support would not touch a modified driver with a ten foot pole.

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Ha - even with that balance sheet, they’re clearly moving away from that model; just a matter of time before the IDE disappears.

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I admit, I do not have all the details that is preventing RBoy from supporting Hubitat.

I wish they both would cooperate and resolve any conflicts so the platform can be enhanced even further.

What, no IDE? Horrors!! :innocent:

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One of the handful of reasons I jumped ship and came here. :smiley:

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Will be interesting to see how that goes. One of (if not THE) largest complaint on Vera was "getting nickled and dimed to death" by their stupid user app store.

I guess we'll see how it goes. I get the need, just worried about the unintended consequences.

Everyone should quickly go fork all gits they like to use (if they haven't already). :wink:

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Or HomeSeer... Yeah I agree with you. Certainly see reasons why though. Hope this helps some devs get more easily compensated for their hard work and time.

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Yeah, when I said Vera I was actually thinking Homeseer. Lol. I wasn't thinking clearly this morning.

But whatever. There are pros and cons. I get it. Hopefully everyone won't pull all their apps/drivers and stick them behind a paywall. It's their right to do so, of course, but it squashes community involvement/sharing.

On the pro side it would encourage some apps/drivers that otherwise wouldn't get released at all.

Pro/con.

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Depends on where the company wants to go I guess... will be interesting for sure. Sadly the reality of what I want and what is the best for the survival of HE are probably different things. The trick will be to balance what they have in this awesome community against necessary growth and maturation process as a company...

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Ha, let me guess: open source and free. :upside_down_face:

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Honestly, who doesn't want that?!!

More seriously, I agree with your perspective that open sourcing built-in drivers (and apps) is a support nightmare. It is not a good idea.

I don't know how you plan to maintain your app/driver storefront (for 3rd party developers). But I hope the purchase price includes a description of the level of support the end-user can anticipate from the 3rd party developer.

More than "nickel and diming" for device support, a failure to meet expectations was a big issue with the old HomeSeer model. Things have changed over there a bit.

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Well, I suppose if Joe wants to sell his whiz-bang weather driver for $10 and offers no support for it, the market will sort that out. Definitely would need a reviews mechanism. Hubitat would stay pretty much hands-off beyond some basic sanity check.

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How is it going to work when users put drivers on the app that they charge for, then Hubitat makes in-box drivers for the same device months later?

That's happened a BUNCH of times in the past few years. As the user drivers were free it was a "so what" In the future, though, Hubitat will be taking sales/money away from those devs - so not really a "so what" any more...

And since Hubitat doesn't give roadmaps on what is upcoming, how is a dev supposed to know if their driver will be supplanted by an in-box one in the next release, thereby effectively de-monetizing it?

It's ok if there are no answers to this now, as there is no store. But I think many developers will expect answers to those questions when there is a store.

Not at all.. :wink: - I already use those.

How would you answer this?

I think it's pretty obvious that we will keep pushing the hub forward. Suppose HubConnect was in the store, and we come out with Hub Mesh? I remember when @Cobra would have some feature in one of his apps, and then RM would get a similar feature not long after (not from having been copied, but because users wanted it). Or, suppose you paid $10 for HubConnect, and a week later Hub Mesh comes out for free. That's life!

BTW, no one says you have to charge for an app/driver.

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