I am wondering if at some point HE would just sell the software to be run on Windows/Linux/Pi like Homeseer does?
Highly unlikely. See this thread: Hub in VM
Likely not going to happen, but would be nice though.. i'm willing to bet a large potion of users here have computers with far more under the hood than there is ever going to be in a purchased hub... hell my media/ security camera/web/ftp server has 64Gb ram and running AMD FX-8350 8core 4Mhz processor.. adding HE i doubt the pc would even show a blip in its resources..
That was one of the few things I really liked about HomeSeer.... I really liked having the server on whatever hardware I wanted, and the zwave on remote z-net devices.
The bigger problem isn't so much the software as it is the Zigbee/Z-Wave hardware. Given that there are quite a few "sticks" out there, it'd be a support nightmare for HE to try and troubleshoot/diagnose all the different configurations.
And then all the installation support for different supported platforms and Operating Systems.
I could see a companion server that took over the heavy lifting (not sure what that might be. Electrons aren't heavy). Perhaps running the bigger more complex apps and using an API to communicate with the hub????
I can't see them supporting anything except their native hardware. And this is based on this question coming up so many times.
Well the could just marketed it to work with certain zwave sticks and certain software. Windows/Linux.
HomeSeer manages it just fine, so it can be done... Granted, that's a much more expensive product.
Exactly my point.