Great. former IRIS user. I hadn't heard Lowe's open sourced the code, good for them. After the IRIS shutdown announcement I switched to the Samsung Smartthings platform since it supports the second gen IRIS sensors along with a lot of other home automation products.
I use the system mostly for security and water leak monitoring.
Having spent most of my time on Arcus, it feels like SmartThings and Arcus are at least conceptually similar. If IRIS had invested more resources into an API and exposing a lot of the internals, they might have had a chance at attracting more technical users. For example, the rules engine and device query system could have been extended to allow more custom automation, and I suspect they could have built out an other "bridge" to provide an API for home-build integrations. However, the IRIS team seems to have been to focus on a relatively small number of things that were exposed to the user, and tried to get them right. I feel like it's a reasonable platform to built on top of, but brings a lot of non-trivial complexity.
I use the system mostly for security and water leak monitoring.