Alas it seems like Thread is a key piece of this stack (for low end devices, high end devices use wifi), and Thread is definitely not at all open access. There are some open source implementations! OpenThread &c! But it's really weird trying to work with, when you don't have any idea how the blasted thing works or what's going on. Very much a side note, but interesting that Thread was chosen, even though the work is being done with the Zigbee Alliance, who used to be Threads competitor! (Thread is UDP/IP based though, so kind of obvious versus the much older mystery protocols that make up Zigbee.) Zigbee Alliance's "dotdot" device profiles seem to have been adopted though for this effort. Zigbee was not any more accessible than Thread though, & in fact, it had considerably less code. Both are based on 802.15.4 wireless protocols.
And alas alas alas, it seems that "you can use it, but you can't know how it works" seems to be how the new CSA / Matter specs are being released too, which just feels meanspirited & shitty to me, on so many levels:
> The CSA is also focused on releasing as much as it can as open-source code, which strikes me as somewhat incongruous with the fact that to see or vote on the developing standard, companies had to pay to join the CSA and the Matter working group. However, the code is all available on Github, and anyone will be able to see it and download it for their applications and devices.
I watch video's like Peter Norvig's "As We May Program"[1] about building smarter systems, systems that serve us better. But I'm sick to death of the ego, of the closeness, of the claims that users need more help. What we need is a fair shake, we need a world that we have the possibility to understand, that we can approach on an honest level. We need access to the technology about us, need the ability to see for ourselves, & not be coddled & consumerized endlessly. Yeah, more advanced help is welcome & good, but we can't allow technology to proliferate endlessly unchecked unseen unintelligibly forever like this, can't keep piling complexity on & claiming, oh, things are so complex that we need to build more automation & more control into the technology for your sake. There has to be some advancement from the other side, to make the technology apparent & truthful & learnable & visible. CSA is not helping. Thread is not helping. They are continuing the war against general purpose computing, new frontiers to allow product makers to flood our lives with things that do not respect us & which do not give us a fair shake.
The world doesn't just need products that interoperate. The world needs to be intelligible, legible. Witholding the standards, not letting people know how technology works, the technology we are literally filling our houses with: that is the enemy of understanding & civilization. We need to free ourselves from these intellectual tar pits, need to stop building such walls between "consumers" and makers, and start to have a more collective approach to socialization of technology. I wish IoT would not stand as such a foe of the Enlightenment.
