From the blog post:
TL;DR: We have joined the Z-Wave Alliance, thanks to revenue from Home Assistant Cloud subscribers, and will start the certification process for Z-Wave JS.
As a z-wave user myself, I am pleased by this. I was apprehensive about Z-Wave JS at first, but its been super reliable and stable for me.
I’m not totally sure what this means in practice other than maybe the continued health of the project. Which sounds good. I’ve been pretty happy with the reliability of zwave js too.
If I were to choose infrastructure today and only looked at the technology and stability I would choose Z-wave over Zigbee, WIFI and Matter any day.
But… The pricing on Z-wave devices is a showstopper and it will eventually kill it.
Yep, it’s because of that proprietary and “every device must be licensed” nature of Z-wave that I use Zigbee devices - I’ll pick an open platform everyday over a closed one, even if it has limitations.