Philips maintains that it's still committed to open technology, and its Hue bridge will continue to work with ZigBee-compatible hardware. Even so, this isn't going to please the home automation crowd. If you want any Philips gear in a new setup, you'll have to go all-Hue in the short term... and when third-party support is ready, you may miss out on bulbs that are cheaper or more flexible. Only a "minimal fraction" of users are likely to be affected by this, Philips says, but it's still unfortunate.

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