This reverse-engineering process is followed in other industries, so there is some precedent.
Sigma is a company that makes lenses for Canon, Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, Sigma, etc. cameras. All of these companies use a different mount. Sigma makes the same lens with different mounts to be used with each manufacturer.
It's complicated in the case of Canon lenses. Canon lenses (in EOS cameras - everything made in the last 20 years or so) use only an electrical connection between the lens and camera body - no moving mechanical parts. All the motors are in the lenses. The camera sends instructions to the lens to tell it what to do. The protocol is proprietary and Canon will not share it with anyone. In order to make Canon lenses, Sigma needs to reverse engineer the protocol. Unfortunately for them, Canon often comes out with new camera bodies that won't work with some of Sigma's lenses (but will work with all previous Canon lenses). When this happens, Sigma needs to re-reverse-engineer the protocol to see what they aren't handling and change the programming in their lenses. They offer to "re-chip" old lenses for customers so that they will work with new cameras. This has got to be expensive, but it's the only way that they can sell lenses to the Canon part of the market (which is sizeable).
I'm not sure that anyone would find the home automation market large enough to support the kind of reverse engineering effort that would be required to make this work. If the protocol is always changing, they need to either not support changes or constantly be reworking their software. If all the rework can be done in software on the PC, at least distribution of new versions is relatively simple. If firmware in the plug-in device needs to be changed, it's a little harder. You can design for it, but it will increase costs.
