The only ones who own "the code" are the manufacturers of it. Crestron, Control4, Savant etc..... We take control protocols provided to us by the manufacturers of the items we want to control and make them work with the code provided to us by the code manufacturer. Those two things combined together make the system programming we use to integrate the items we either sell or take control of for our customers.

None of you, including myself, are creating anything. We are simply a bridge that have been trained in someone else's code.

GUI is something that we can create and it should be sold appropriately.

But quite obviously with the recent success of systems like Savant and Control4, customers don't give a crap about GUI they just want it to work. And integrators don't want to spend time having to create a GUI either.

There are way to many of us doing things just because we can, not profiting from it and then puffing our chest out to whoever will listen (which I assure you is just us).

I refer to the auto industry. You can't go order a custom dashboard from BMW or Mercedes. It looks and feels as it does, and it works. You may not like one over the other so you choose.

The client who buys the system owns the program that makes it work. You sold it to them as a working system and in order for that to be true, it needs the program. If they want to add, change or move anything in their system, they should be able to do so without hassle.

Leave it onsite and make them responsible for managing it. Of course you have a copy for changes etc...

This is yet another thing in our industry that hinders growth. Know one here has taken over a system without the client bad mouthing the original integrator for whatever reason.

Stop giving our customers reasons to bad mouth this industry. Provide them with the program.