It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.

Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.

All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.

Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.