Hi @johanstokking ,
Thank you for your previous comments, which I would like to take up briefly in parts and place my (personal) opinion.
From my experience, TTN/TTI is what it is today because of the openness, the free offer and thus the large mass of users who use it and thus also made it interesting for manufacturers. Without free offers it would never have been (also from my point of view) - at least not in this period of time - so successful, rightly so I think, because what TTI does, also for the community, is a very valuable contribution and also the LoRaWAN Alliance or LoRa(WAN) would not have become what it is today in this short time if there were pioneers like you (through TTN/TTI), but also the Loraserver project - today ChirpStack - the OpenSource idea here is that A wide variety of people are involved in the development, thus accelerating the development and sharing knowledge - I cannot understand why TTI is reacting in this explicit case in this way, although I can understand that through ‘competition’ such as the ChirpStack project 'the commercial part of TTI may be impaired and you want to defend USPs in this way.
As you have already described, the payloads and other data stored there are partly free contributions from the manufacturers, which TTI may have actively asked to maintain their devices there. That you check the data and pay attention to the quality is, in my view, exactly what applies to all data in an active (Git) repository and what is the task of every repository owner and not only applies to this part - but me let me teach you better. The following example shows that this is not always the case and of course cannot be the case (sorry for the missing PR for that). I further assume that the manufacturers are aware that they are now making the data available there under your license conditions? You may have informed them of this change.
Anyway - a central device and payload database / data source as you described - under the LoRaAlliance is certainly the best way to avoid exactly such a discussion in the future, because the manufacturers are certainly interested in having the best possible sales of the devices and thus reaching everyone who enables the integration of their devices and not only users of the TTN or the commercial products of TTI.
Finally, a big thank you to TTI, who make important contributions to the development of LoRaWAN, especially with the TTN network and the experience gained from it, and thus also contribute to the important development of the protocol by participating in the LoRaWAN Alliance. But also a big thank you to @brocaar, who - with the development of the ChirpStack - always stays very close to the current developments around LoRaWAN and offers an alternative for everyone - we live from alternatives and everyone should be able to use what is best for their application fits. We should also all uphold the open source idea, there are enough proprietary solutions that can get us into a situation over time that is difficult to get out of.
PS: Please don’t see yourselves as competitors - everyone can learn from everyone, always. There are enough black sheep in the LoRaWAN environment who don’t share their knowledge and just take it.
Best regards and thanks!