There’s quite a few ways to mess around with home automation, with the most popular communication methods being things like ZigBee, plain Wi-Fi, and so on. One of the more promising new technologies is Thread, and Dennis Schubert decided to try and use it for a new homebrew project he was working on. After diving into the legalese of the matter, though, he discovered that Thread is a complete non-starter due to excessive mandatory membership fees without any exceptions for non-commercial use.
To summarize: if you’re a hobbyist without access to some serious throwaway money to join the Thread Group, there is no way to use Thread legally – the license does not include an exception for non-commercial uses. If you’re like me and want to write a series of blog posts about how Thread works, there’s also no legal way.
A commercial membership program for technology stacks like Thread isn’t new; it’s somewhat common in that space. Same with requiring certifications for your commercial products if you want to use a logo like the “Works with Thread” banner. And that’s fine with me. If you’re selling a commercial electronics product, you have to go through many certification processes anyway, so that seems fair. But having a blanket ban on implementations, even for non-commercial projects, is absolutely bonkers. This means that no hobbyist should ever get close to it, and that means that the next generation of electrical engineers and decision-makers don’t get to play around with the tech before they enter the industry. But of course, that doesn’t really matter to the Thread Group: their members list includes companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Nordic, NXP, and Qualcomm – they can just force Thread into being successful by making sure it’s shipped in the most popular “home hubs”. So it’s just us that get screwed over.
Anyway, if you planned to look at Thread… well, don’t. You’re not allowed to use it.
↫ Dennis Schubert
So you can buy Thread dev kits to create your own devices at home, but even such non-commercial use is not allowed. The situation would be even more complex for anyone trying to sell a small batch of fun devices using Thread, because they’d first have to fork over the exorbitant yearly membership fee. What this means is that Thread is a complete non-starter for anyone but an established name, which is probably exactly why the big names are pushing it so hard.
They want to control our home automation just as much as everything else, and it seems like Thread is their foot in the door. Be advised.
Dennis Schubert has just had his Richard Stallman moment – realizing that proprietary software licenses actually are anti-social, and that free software truly is a moral value that is necessary for a free society. Stallman had that moment in 1980 when he realized that the license on the software for the new network printer at the MIT AI lab would not allow him to reprogram it to message users when their print jobs were done, saving them a trip to another floor of the building to check on their printouts. He knew how to reprogram the printer, but was not legally allowed to. Schubert is expressing that same sense of abhorrence at the apparent “evil” involved in keeping such a brilliant low-power mesh networking technology from being hacked on by enthusiasts.
It’s a moral values argument. Eric S. Raymond dislikes the moral values argument, stating that it drives people away from participating in the free software movement – that people do not want to be burdened with an extra layer of morality. But we have no real choice in the matter – at the end of the day, we have a natural innate revulsion to these restrictions against hacking and sharing. It’s a very natural human response.
> Dennis Schubert has just had his Richard Stallman moment
Considering he’s working at mozilla and worked on diaspora, I’d guess he’s had a few of those…
So how does this fit with OpenThread under the BSD 3 license? It seems to have developed and released for the very reason stated by the author. Am I missing something here?
https://github.com/openthread
Read the article, and you’d know.
The answer there is, yup. Brain missing. I sit corrected.
From article…
This warrants some discussion. Since the license covers copyrights, we can deduce that “IP rights” in this context refers to patents. The thing about patents is that they technically can be used against almost all FOSS projects and not just this one. For example there are no patent protection clauses in GPL2. I don’t know if there’s any precedent for it, but there’s nothing stopping someone from contributing to a GPL2 or MIT project and then going after users for patent royalties.
GNU recognized this problem and has explicit provisions for it in GPL3, but many FOSS projects remain licensed under licenses that simply never covered patent rights. OpenThread isn’t particularly unique in this regard, however the way they cover it in the FAQ almost suggests the Thread consortium has the intention to sue users of it’s own FOSS, which…yuck.
It’s kind of like fire insurance – you generally need to pay to get coverage. This itself isn’t immoral. Fire insurance is real. But it’s very different if you go in as the mafia “it’d be a shame if your home were to burn down, pay us and it won’t happen”. In case people aren’t familiar with this trope, it means the mafia themselves go about setting the fires and the payment is extortion to stop their own harmful acts.
Legal indemnification from the patent lawsuits of others may have legitimate business value. The reality is most FOSS projects don’t have the legal resources to indemnify users from patent lawsuits, certainly not for free. That is innocent enough. The problem with Thread Group’s answer is that it fails to differentiate themselves from the mafia in patent lawsuit terms “it’d be a shame if you were to be sued for patent infringement, pay us and it won’t happen”.
One more thing to add: Matter requires a certification process, and that involves PKI. This can mean that your network will refuse to accept an uncertified device. That’s not your network…
Well. I had no idea that licensing/etc was so restrictive/shitty. And here I sit thinking that when ESPHome adds support for the ZigBee ESP chips it’d be great to start DIYing Thread stuff. Guess that’s not going to happen now *sigh*
Drizzt321,
IMHO individual hobbyists are extremely unlikely to end up in court because there’s no money in it. Corporate patent trolls are more interested in large targets with large payouts. So I feel the author has exaggerated the risk for end users. That said, I agree with the author on moral grounds, it’s kind of reprehensible to put out FOSS while threatening legal action. This goes completely against the spirit of FOSS.
Yeah, but if I do a cool little project, and all of a sudden it gets super popular, especially if some 3rd party rips off my code and starts making things commercially, I wouldn’t be surprised if they came after me.
This doesn’t seem very different from eg. the IEEE forcing non-commercial developers to pay to view a standard, or Google forcing non-commercial developers to pay to host their apps at Google Play. That doesn’t make any of these right, of course, I’m just pointing out that the problem is far more widespread than indicated.
Is there any public record of the Thread Group suing or even warning individuals for hobbyist use? I think not. However, the legal language is stressful. I bet they have internal disagreement. They should allow hobbyists to register officially and in the process formally agree to home use only. Problem solved.