Hacker News Reader

Come on man. I don’t even need to link the xkdc comic but I will.

How do you force companies to play nice without regulation?

Nobody, you got that all wrong. 802.15.4 and 6LoWPAN are established, quite mature standards. HomeKit is the (proprietary) challenger, that adds nothing but an ecosystem for Apple to profit from

What about Thread and OpenThread? Zwave?

Edit: What about Zigbee? Google Home? WeMo? And new to me, Bluetooth Mesh.

Exactly, here I was thinking Zwave & Zigbee are the non-proprietary industry standard for wireless communication in home automation?

Zwave is proprietary. Zigbee is "not really" open. There is no open implementation AFAIK, the application library (cluster library) is standardized and everyone is allowed to develop and sell compatible devices, yet you won't be able to fetch the code and deploy on the platform of your choice, AFAIK. In this regard Zwave and Zigbee are quite similar.

Almost all the mentioned standards are based on IEEE 802.15.4.

The difference between 6LoWPAN and and the rest of the mentioned "standards": 6LoWPAN is IPv6 "adapted"/compatible. Thread is based/extends on 6LoWPAN, and adds several missing features or replaces some parts, because similar to conventional Internet devices, you need something more than IPv6 to get things going.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com