It’s good to see Marc Fleury go public with his new project, an open-source home automation project (not yet a company) called OpenRemote. We’d talked about it back at Open Source Goat Rodeo 2008, but he seemed to be taking his time to actually release something.

The problem that I see with this idea? We already have an excellent Linux-based home automation company called Control4.

Control4 was started years ago by a pair of serial entrepreneurs, Will West and Eric Smith. That broadband in your hotel? They are nearly certainly the ones who put it there (iBahn).

I used to be involved with Control4 during my time as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, an investor in Control4. The company was doing fantastically well back then (2003/2004), and I’m betting it has easily cleared $100 million in sales by now, and has signed up every major distributor and OEM one can envision.

This is a very, very well-run company. Is there room for an open-source competitor?

… Source:The Open Road

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 9:18 am and is filed under Business and Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.