Many of the integrations you'll see in Home Assistant are reversed-engineered. Usually this is done by looking at the mobile apps of many of these devices and extracting credentials, certs...etc. A few manufacturers don't love this for various reasons and try to shut it down. We end up spending time explaining to them why it will just result in a cat-and-mouse game and hurts them in the long-run.

On Seam being open source, we've debated this back and forth internally, especially given most of us came from various OSS projects. Tbh, there's already a ton of options for open sourced integrations. When/where we see one that's lacking, we may contribute ours back...etc. fwiw I don't think it's a done deal that we won't fully open source more of our infra down the line. We'll see.

>why isn't seam itself open?

I'd say primarily because making money with an open product is very very difficult, regardless of the industry you build for.

It sounds like it would be difficult to "open core" the product too.

This too. It's pretty important we focus on building a viable business (see current funding environment). Contrary to popular belief, building open source isn't free and takes time away from that effort. You have to make sure your stuff runs on the various platforms, you gotta triage issues...etc.

Now for certain products, such as databases, not being open is borderline a non-starter. But for many other infra categories, the customer doesn't purchase your product based on whether it is open source or not. For example, no one cares that Stripe, Twilio, or Plaid aren't fully open source. Customers just want the API to work.

Personally, I'd like to see Seam go more open as we get more resources/bandwidth. We've already published a few things (https://github.com/seamapi) and I'd like to do more over time such as publishing firmware, open connectors, backends you can run anywhere...etc.

> no one cares that Stripe, Twilio, or Plaid aren't fully open source

You keep drawing parallels to fintech

> Tbh, it's pretty much the same reason that made Plaid popular with the fintech ecosystem.

But it's not the same thing. It's impossible to legally implement this yourself. You can't just make a library (I, naively, did try). All that being said, I understand the product now. It's not for me, but that's ok. Thanks for being so responsive

> I'd say primarily because making money with an open product is very very difficult

Well - Home assistant makes money in a transparent way and lots of people pay for cloud access without even using/needing it just to support the devs.