[smgw] Initial contribution

[J-N-K]

This integrates smart meter gateways from PPC which are in widespread-use for supplier provided smart meters.

Topic: https://community.openhab.org/t/integration-smart-meter-geteway-smgw-in-openhab/123772
Marketplace: https://community.openhab.org/t/smgw-binding-4-0-0-5-0-0/151845

[lolodomo]

Only 522 lines !
I am tempted to try an express review...

[J-N-K]

It's quite simple, but hard to do in a rule because you need to get cookies and headers right. Otherwise it's just some website parsing.

[J-N-K]

All done.

[lolodomo]

@J-N-K : you forgot the comment about the NOTICE file. You can take example from other bindings using jsoup. I also just added a last minor comment about binding naming in the documentation.

For example:
https://github.com/openhab/openhab-addons/blob/main/bundles/org.openhab.binding.linky/NOTICE#L15

[lolodomo]

Thank your this new binding contribution.

[stefan-hoehn]

@J-N-K out of curiosity: Doesn't a bundle require a specific image in openhab-docs/images/addons or did I overlook the PR for that?

[J-N-K]

@stefan-hoehn What is the policy regarding the license of the pictures?

PPC provides the logo for download, but unfortunately there is no hint to the license. https://www.ppc-ag.de/de/unternehmen/downloadcenter/

[stefan-hoehn]

This is actually a pretty good question which I never thought of.

We have not written anything about that here https://www.openhab.org/docs/developer/addons/ either.

I would relate it as "fair use" but I am sure that this is legally a wrong perception. "most likely" all the companies we write a binding for will not mind but again that is not a statement that sticks in the long run.

The only way to be sure is to ask the company for their allowance, I guess.

@kaikreuzer @Confectrician
Any thoughts or experience you can share on this?

[jlaur]

The only way to be sure is to ask the company for their allowance, I guess.

I'm also interested in this. For Energi Data Service and Danfoss Air Unit I have written permissions from the companies to be on the safe side, but it was hard figuring out who to ask and getting through to someone who could actually give that permission. I don't even know how legally valid those e-mailed permissions are, but at least they are proof of "good faith". The other thing is that I personally have those e-mails, but they are not (yet) shared anywhere.

I'm under the impression that many logo contributions were without any kind of explicit permissions, so I guess it would be good to have guidelines for what is expected (or what is not).

[kaikreuzer]

We have thought about this already. Initially, we avoided using such logos for exactly these reasons. That's why openHAB 1 and 2 looked very dull in comparison to today's UI. 😄

We then had a look over the fence to Home Assistant and saw that they had gathered a huge pile of logos in their repo and didn't seem to care much about explicit permission, so we decided to do the same.

To make sure that we do not appear to publish these logos as if we would own them, we explicitly excluded them from our license and made it very clear that they are property of their respective owners.

It is naturally the right of every company to ask us not to use their logo - we will remove it from the repo immediately in such a case. So far, this has never happened though, so we believe that everybody silently agrees that this is fair use and that it actually benefits all sides.

[stefan-hoehn]

@J-N-K Would you like to add the logo then?