Eh?

The software is free, but no dev works for free.

It’s possible to engineer software well and still earn a living.

That said, engineering software poorly is often a choice, usually made by people who are poor engineers. In some cases, and I suspect this may be the case for Nabu Casa Inc., the people are such poor engineers that they aren’t even aware that their software is poorly engineered. Many technology companies are better at business than they are engineering.

Edit: actually no, I don’t think Nabu Casa Inc. are unaware of their poor engineering, I think they just don’t care. They’re far more concerned with maintaining their company’s profits.

Why so negative?

It’s clear that the Nabu Casa Inc. people, who also happen to be the Home Assistant project leaders, are focussed on making money over making well engineered software.

For example, Home Assistant’s settings page includes an entry for Nabu Casa Inc.'s cloud services product as the first entry in the list and there’s no option to switch it off.

Home Assistant is engineered in such a way as to make it difficult to install on operating systems that aren’t under control of Nabu Casa Inc., like Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Container. If Home Assistant were engineered well, it would be simple to take individual Home Assistant packages and build and install them on any distribution, as has been customary in the free software community for decades. As far as I know, there’s no reason Home Assistant must be an operating system rather than simply individual packages. See https://feddit.uk/post/17543373 and especially https://feddit.uk/post/17543373/12207671 .

Bands also makes merch to increase their income, should we hate on them as well?

If a band makes selling merch their purpose, over and above making decent music, then I would likewise scorn them.

Oh, and before I forget: have you seen our brand new merch store?

🤮

If you have to ask other people whether you should be a doctor, you should not be a doctor.