Comment by andsoitis
To succeed, consumers need to be able to rely on standards conformance.
Certification is an obvious way and that costs money.
Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?
To succeed, consumers need to be able to rely on standards conformance.
Certification is an obvious way and that costs money.
Is there a way without certification that results in high conformance that consumers can rely on?
Having been in the business of creating standards compliant equipment in the past, the problem is not as simple as you state. You can provide all of the reference implementations you want and you still will get variances.
The state-of-the-art solution is to put a bunch of people on planes and burn a bunch of jet fuel to attend a "test fest". You can't issue interoperability until you do this. This costs money that needs to be paid by someone.
> ou can provide all of the reference implementations you want and you still will get variances.
A proper reference implementation should first and foremost come with an extensive battery of regression tests, something many a vaunted "standard" utterly fails to provide, being instead tomes upon tomes of impossible to decipher specifications, written - of all things - in human language.
Such a battery of regression tests, if properly design ought to take care of your "variations" in fairly short order.
Standards conformance is one thing. But to guard against manufacturer end-of-support and/or bankruptcy there must be provisions for adversarial interoperability too, which I believe is currently lacking. This is not the case in other, even commercial systems like KNX, where while the configuration tools are paid and proprietary, communication between devices works based on well-defined types and “registers” and any device can interact with any other regardless of the manufacturer’s wish, ensuring cross-manufacturer compatibility even in case of manufacturer failure.
This is why all the (commercial!) high-end home automation uses KNX, because installers can mix and match products and know they won’t get cornered even if a single manufacturer goes out of business.
(And if you want a cheaper system that can be operated with fully-free tools, you’re already covered, that’s ZigBee! But even KNX is “open” once you buy the license for ETS - the config tool - and then you can go to town on your system and reconfigure it at will.)
Certification is desirable to me, so long as it doesn't mandate taking away the freedom of the owners of devices for local control and the ability to install whatever software they want on those devices.
I had no idea that Matter/Thread mandates secure boot. Presumably that's secure boot without end user freedom to load their own keys. That's no good.
Why not have it be like the law profession? 100% open source with licensing.
The standards side of things is true, however this can be largely solved by providing a reference implementation, given that no device manufacturer is going to implement the stack from scratch. Automated testing of firmware would also work. As for high conformance... WiFi and BT devices manage to work well enough by simply buying a tested chipset and building on that, no external testing/fees necessary.
I understand the certification if a manufacturer wants to sell a product commercially as 'Matter Certified'. For hobbyists or smaller players, pulling the reference implementation, loading it onto a cheap MCU, and calling it 'Works with Matter' would suffice.
As it stands, the latter isn't an option, because of the codesigning they've shoehorned into the spec. And for all the noise made about security, once connected to the hub the manufacturer can run whatever they like on it and send data back to their servers with very little visibility to the user.
Thread is arguably the interesting part for low power devices, and doesn't force certification. Matter is little more than a protocol spec, at the tradeoff of locked down devices and annual fees. For Matter over WiFi, I can't see any point whatsoever in using it. And for the costs of Doing Matter/Thread certification most smaller hardware startups will balk at the hundreds of thousands required to do so, and stick with WiFi/BT/Zigbee/Thread + roll their own protocol/app.