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A home is a sanctuary. A place of refuge.
A place free from danger—and free from prying eyes. A home is where you can be yourself without compromising your data, your ideals, your behavior, or your independence.

I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we're driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.

Paulus Schoutsen

President | Board of the Open Home Foundation

Our story

The Open Home Foundation represents a new chapter in a journey that started in 2013, when the founder of Home Assistant, Paulus Schoutsen, wrote a few lines of Python to take control of his Philips Hue smart lights.

Initially, all Schoutsen wanted was greater control of the devices he’d purchased—rather than letting a corporate giant decide what was best for his home.

It was a simple act. But it struck a chord.

Over the coming years, thousands of mostly volunteer contributors transformed that first script into a leading smart home platform. And then they built an entire ecosystem of projects around it.

Something far more troubling also took place: The smart home landscape grew increasingly dominated by Big Tech—whose purpose is to constantly sell you something new, while siphoning off your personal data for financial gain.

This destructive change brought into focus the importance of privacy, choice, and sustainability. Principles that in 2021, Schoutsen and others called the building blocks of the open home.

In fact, Nabu Casa had already been fighting for the idea, alongside support for critical open standards—like Zigbee, Z-Wave, and Matter—for the past few years.

But by 2023, this core group of smart home developers realized it was time to codify and protect their ideals. And it was time to create a formal home for the projects they and so many other contributors had poured their souls, beliefs, and shared code into.

Their individual efforts needed to be united. So in 2024 they created the Open Home Foundation to unite them.

Our values are all about you

The Open Home Foundation’s projects, support, and advocacy stand in stark contrast to the smart home alternative driven by surveillance capitalism. You should never be the product—whether the products or services you use are free or paid.

We stand for a world where you can:

Live your life.
Because nobody is watching.

You do you, and nobody else
With local control of your data, you choose what you want to do, how you want to live, and who you really are. Everything from the shows you watch, to when you watch them, the services you use, to how you use them, and the people you meet, to what you do with them—should never be influenced by uncertainty about who knows what.

Only share what you want, with whom you want, for as long as you want. You hold the keys to your data, so nobody else can compel you to trade personal information for smart home functionality.

Design your smart home.
The way you like it.

Mix, match, and combine devices however you want
With local APIs, open standards, and community development, you choose the design of your smart home as you imagine it—not as some corporate interest does. One company’s battery-powered, Bluetooth temperature sensor to help automate another company’s bathroom fan? A video feed of your bird feeder that you can keep local thanks to an open communication standard? A personal voice assistant that doesn’t phone home? No problem.

The only limits are your imagination for connecting devices, your drive to tinker, and the creativity of helpful communities.

Consume less.
So you can save more.

Save stuff from the dump, save money—and reduce your impact
With the ability to repurpose old hardware, you won’t have to toss a perfectly functioning device just because there’s a newer model. With the insight to see the amount of water or energy you’re using—and details on when, and how—you can automate your smart home to cut your utility bills, and reduce your carbon footprint. All in one fell swoop.

Sustainability is a big word, with a lot of meanings. You decide what it means to your life, and we’ll help you achieve it.

This is what we’ve done

We have created a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware. The Open Home Foundation has done this by taking ownership of over 240 smart home projects, standards, drivers, and libraries. For the people and organizations who have transferred projects to the Open Home Foundation, this protection even extends against their future selves—so that smart home users will continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what the future brings.

But the work of the Open Home Foundation doesn’t stop there. Through close partnership with Nabu Casa, the foundation funds, directs resources to, and collaborates on the development of external projects that can be used by anyone, like Z-Wave JS, WLED, Rhasspy, and Zigbee2MQTT.

Our ambitions go further

The Open Home Foundation aims to one day have the resources to be an active political advocate. We aim to educate the public and public servants, and the companies making smart home devices and services, about the value of open standards, open-source projects, and privacy, choice, and sustainability when it comes to the future of smart homes.

Your open smart private _______ open home