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Comment by dwelch

5 years ago

I agree. This is kind of bizarre behavior from someone who is such an important contributor to Home Assistant, a large scale open source platform. I can’t imagine most of the leaders in Home Assistant would share this attitude, but maybe I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, the founder of Home Assistant has acted similarly too. When NixOS maintainers raised concerns, he accused them of having "no intention to contribute anything positively." This was despite NixOS maintainers' best efforts to engage in a civil discussion.

To make matters worse, he even used the fact that the NixOS discussion was temporarily locked down due to high tensions and accused NixOS maintainers of attempting to shift the maintenance burden on Home Assistant, which is hardly what all this is about.

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-addi...

  • It seems like HA has its own plugin distribution model, whereas NixOS is trying to work around that to provide reproducible builds.

    Aside from how this issue has been handled, poorly, that seems like a reasonable technical decision for HA to make, particularly given that their main use case is semi-technical user installing on a Raspberry Pi, and in that case is it something they should be forced to support? A fork seems like the right option there?

    • Nobody is actually asking them to support anything. And they “refused” a fork (which is pointless as nothing stops one from happening). They seem to want to hold some control over their software that is against the usual rules of the game for OSS.

  • This and the OP seem to suggest there is something else going on behind the scenes than just abrasive personalities. Do the people who work on Home Assistant have some issue with NixOS?

  • It's sad to know that Home Assistant is such a project. I should consider alternatives. Partially I can grasp them, but the attitude in reply is really looks bad.