|
We thought about this long and hard. We decided to keep the firmware closed to ensure the stability of the controllers. The firwmare is > 200 pages of assembler and while it is commetned, there is no documentation on the architecture of the firmware. This would make development difficult.
You may sneer and say we did this to protect our revenue from sales of XPRESS upgrades. Not true. We get very little $$$ from XPRESS upgrades since most people already have v3.5 or higher and have gotten their upgrades (which are only bug fixes) for free.
We feared that if the firmware was opened up, we'd face a support nightmare where user X downloaded firmware variant Y and is having trouble. If you add in Compiler or HOST variant Z it would be a mess. Keeping the firmware under wraps allows us to ensure the controller boards are stable. We may at some point start offering the EPROM hex files as free downloads allowing folks with EPROM programmers to upgrade their own chips.
Besides, the HCS-III is on the horizon and its firmware WILL be open source. So all is not lost. We also will be making a lot of the details about how the firmware works public for the benefit of folks writing custom compilers and clients.
We hope you understand why we made this decision.
| 
Home Automation FAQ : 
I'm nervous about participating in an Open Source project run by a for profit business