@nosnhojm I don’t know… it seems with all of your experience then it would be understandable why @bravenel made his decision. I don’t expect you to code groovy, but having experience supporting an open source project you may have a different perspective.
I don’t know what you expect, all of these apps by other developers might be pulled at any time. I think that people need to have that expectation coming in.
You started this thread started with wondering why developers would pack up shop and take their code. It is frustrating the recent platform woes, and i think it is surprising more people haven’t left the community and give up on ST recently.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
82
That’s why Apache 2.0 (and other restriction free) licenses exist and why users like yourself should not have expections that code won’t be “withdrawn” (or otherwise restricted), unless it has such a license. You should be particularly aware of this, I would think.
Apache 2.0 (and other similar licenses) are extremely valuable options for developers to offer. The biggest value is for the users, firstly, however (and, in turn, this may benefit the developer with more users and voluntary / collaborative development assistance).
I bring this up as important educational information. Anyone using Community code / apps / DTHs should first consider the impact of the license that code bears.
Most users do not pay attention. Bruce’s code license conditions clearly gave him the right to unilaterally withdraw the code from distribution. No one had any right to expect more.
If you have a different expectation, then only use code with more liberal licenses. (And if you are a developer, make your license choice very carefully.)
Rule Machine was released under Apache and recently changed to a restrictive license (2-3 months ago?).
Honestly that is my hesitation about smarttiles (which I use and love) is that it can go away at anytime and there is nothing I can do about it.
2 Likes
RBoy
(www.rboyapps.com - Making SmartThings Easy!)
85
So here is where I think the issue lies. Not withstanding the completely “shitty” QA process for which there is no reasonable excuse from ST.
The folks at ST don’t have any apps that’s are nearly as complex as Rule Machine or some of the other community apps. So their “testing” is limited to their ecosystem of marketplace apps. So when they make changes I don’t think they the ability to really test the limits of the platform or in ways some of these apps do.
So that brings it back to who is responsible for the apps and their support on the community? What role does ST play in the creation and support of these apps given the apps are often as robust as the platform itself?
How can the DEV advocacy team really make an impact to this? They are advocacy. How much say do you think they have in the development and support processes. The developers at ST have the first priority to their own apps. If that works fine I suspect they turn a blind ear to the community until someone prooves beyond doubt that the issue is with the platform and then also the path to fixing it is riddled with political organizational hurdles since ST does not own or is impacted directly by the malfunctioning apps. (To @tgauchat point earlier does ST treat these apps users as their own users?). Every time a ST DEV fixes a bug he runs the risk of breaking something in an ST approved app. So who owns the risk for fixing it?
I suspect these are the political battles the DEV advocacy team is fighting and the users on the community are caught in between unfortunately.
I find it a bit suspect that you are located less than 10 miles from Smartthings’ Minneapolis office.
You’ve been here just a hair over two weeks. Try having them ignore and lie to you for another year and then get back to us.
I wondered how long it would be before you started wielding the ban hammer.
bamarayne
(Jason "The Enabler" as deemed so by @Smart)
88
Honestly, once the system is stable and folks can actually form a consistent history of what they have, I would like to to see this…
As part of the QA vetting process of community developed apps, actual volunteers, with a minimum amount of hardware that can form complex configuration act as beta testers to really push the limits of an app.
Let the talk works perform real world testing. Get it out here where it can be used and our supposed will be home with it all day while we’re out. Trust me, that will get the kinks worked out really fast.
I can’t even install smart tiles. Seems there’s an issue with new users, every time I click on my hub location to allow ST access it says “client is not associated with that location”.
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
90
Please drop us a line at: Support@SmartTiles.click and/or comment on the SmartTiles Topic, please.
There is some truth to this. Its hard to get the entire community to take a collective sigh, especially since we’re all in various stages of “grief” over what the SmartThings platform could('ve) be(en). But really that’s what we need. You can see it often on @pstuart’s face during the last developer call. The struggle to remain positive and constructive when things you’re being told feel so much like you’ve been told them before. SmartThings has a ways to go to earn back trust. Unfortunately there is no amount of community venting allowances, promises, or 20% off coupons that will do that. Nothing other than reliably delivering from one minute to the next until minutes become hours, days, weeks, months…
I think what SmartThings could do is ask themselves how do we prove its different this time? To me that would include more transparency around the master plan of what changes are scheduled, realistic timelines, what impact those changes are each expected to have. Presentation of a long term plan for the platform being capable of running 10x volume…Others obviously mileage may vary.
But if you come out and tell me in the next two weeks we’re going to roll out passive change x, and we expect it to improve system metric y by z% percent, and system metric y is the key metric of our top incident causing stack, It makes me feel like you’re accepting some accountability for a measurable improvement. It’s more than just an open ended promise of it getting better. Further if you then fail to meet the criteria either by date, improvement expected, or passivity and come back and tell me why and what you’re changing to try and ensure it doesn’t happen again, I still feel like there’s hope rather than just SmartThings up to their usual ways.
I think that’s the level of transparency and communication that quality organizations have with their clients/customers. Granted those types of relationships generally cost more than one time fee of $100. So I understand if that’s not on the table.
However without it, I think your original point rings true. The best bet for a user is just to “sigh” take a break from the expectation that things should work and wait for the pleasant surprise of when they do or for something better to come along inducing a mass exodus…
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
92
Yup… We know this is not an ideal situation, but, frankly, the same thing can happen to SmartThings (or Gmail, or Flickr, or Revolv, or Dropbox, or Slack, or the Community Forum, or GitHub, or Yahoo Finance, or Netflix, or IQTELL, or Evernote, …).
i.e., SmartThings can go away at anytime and there is nothing you can do about it.
And this is the answer many have speculated before. This is why all of our requests for X or Y, go into the last drawer, and it makes sense. Having a bigger customer base elsewhere, where the average user has some lights and uses the ST suggested apps, you have to put your efforts into platform stability, instead of versatility. Which is a good thing, because no matter how many awesome apps devs create, they will be flaky if the platform itself is not stable. Hell, @bravenel himself was a big advocate of ST until his garage door decided to start opening by itself.
Rule Machine and other powerful, yet complex apps, are not the bigger picture. That is the reason why most devs submit their apps and then they wait, and wait and wait…
ST power relies on this community, but this community is not the future of ST.
The reason is actually lack of resources and process. We are adding resources and changing our processes to allow more approvals of community submitted apps. We want more apps approved, not less. We just need the experience for the general consumer to be better.
We have to work on things like search, sorting, and ratings if we are going to have thousands of apps in our marketplace.
It was never Bruce’s responsibility to make all of our lives better through his capabilities…let’s put that one front and center.
My take on it is us community members look out for one another…Bruce’s “pay it forward” thing…so, now is are time to do so by being supportive of his decision as well as one another in his absence.
Lots of lessons learned for me…one of them is be careful relying on non-ST approved code as it can be yanked at any time for any reason and all reasons would be justified. This isn’t a shot across anyone’s bow mind you…but it is my castle we’re talking here…should I be so reliant?
This community is what WE make it folks…remember that.
That is non-sense, unless ST revokes your access to ide, you have all the code you’ve published, and if you don’t have a back up on your computer saved in a txt file, well that’s your real lesson
As someone who codes for a living, but still does it on the side as a hobby to get a rush out of my new ST HA obsession, I could not agree more with this statement!
As someone who codes for a living, but still does it on the side as a hobby to get a rush out of my new ST HA obsession, I could not agree more with this statement!