Or do we have to actually obtain a Vera device before being able to script plugins for it?
Well all the Lua stuff you can write and test inside the vanilla Lua interpretor you get online at: lua.org. However that won’t have our extensions or the z-wave/upnp/etc. We thought about releasing a Windows version of the software for development w/out an actual Vera. But it’s quite a bit of work since we need to setup a web server (we’re using lighttpd in Vera), a cgi handler (haserl is used on Vera), port forwarding (harder to do scripted in Windows than with iptables in Vera), and some of the supporting libraries we use, like the openssl for encryption, etc., would also need to be ported. We’ll do it eventually, but for now our development effort is on finalizing a release version of Luup. That’s why we’re giving away free hardware and $200 rebates for anyone who uses Luup on Vera, so that an interested Luup developer doesn’t need to make such a financial commitment to get going.
Sorry for perhaps a naive qiestion, but why wouldn’t you build such a thing for plain old Ubuntu? 
Might be easier…
It would be a lot easier for us. But since our target market isn’t Linux specific, I don’t think many of our end users have Ubuntu, so we’d have to divert some resources (not as much as Windows, but still some) to an emulator that perhaps nobody would use. I think we may have a Windows version in a few months, but first we’ve got work to finish up the release.
Well, guys, it would be better to have something workable quick, then something cozy and nice but too late.
See, it’s not easy to get the actual hardware for development - not everyone would be able to shell out $300 for testing unit during job market collapse, with an option that may be he’ll get a partial reimbursement a couple of months later. Or may be not, if something didn’t work out as planned.
I hear you. But we have now thousands of customers who are anxiously waiting for the next release and the iPhone app, support for locks in the blackberry app, etc. I have a strong suspicion that we’d have lots of users really pissed off if we had to put those off for 2 weeks to instead work on a Ubuntu version, which would be used by only a small few. 2 weeks is probably the minimum dev time to setup a new build environment, port, etc., to a Ubuntu distro. And remember, since we setup firewall, port forwards, etc., the syntax of the conf files change every 6 months with each new Ubuntu release. So, if we did this for Ubuntu 0904, it would be outdated in October anyway and we’d have to put the resources on it again since the Ubuntu maintainers wouldn’t maintain this with too narrow a user base. I know Ubuntu intimately and use it myself, and I run our software on Ubuntu and Windows, so I know well the issues.
As far as a dev needing to shell out $300… With the $200 rebate, it’s $99, and as far as may be he’ll get the rebate, we’ve put in writing that as long as the dev releases something that proves he’s really a developer, even if it’s limited, he’ll get the rebate. And note that even if the dev doesn’t get his own plugin going right, he could do one of our ‘high priority plugins’ where we’re offering $250-$500 bonuses for really simple plugins which are < 1 days of work, like RS232 interfaces to TV’s, in addition to the $200 rebate. So Vera will end up being free and he’ll have extra cash in his pocket. We made the bar very low so anybody who’s really a developer and serious gets it for $99. But there has to be some bar or else everybody will say “I’m a developer” and we’ll be subsidizing the purchase for everyone’s hardware.