Appliances giant Haier reportedly issued a takedown notice to a software developer for creating Home Assistant integration plugins for the company's home appliances and releasing them on GitHub.
  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    There’s clearly a lot of negative towards the company, which I agree with, but I’m not reading enough positive support for the dev…

    It must be a bit daunting being on the frontline going through this

    I’d guess that anyone using the plugin could help them feel supported in these situations by contributing on their “Buy me a coffee” link…

    https://www.buymeacoffee.com/andre0512

  • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    Their follow-up:

    I have written to Haier to try to get some clarification and perhaps an agreement. I hope Haier will listen to us now that so many people are supporting us. Thank you all!

    Dear Haier team,

    you have probably noticed that my announcement to delete the plugin has met with a lot of displeasure from the community. There are a number of people who bought your appliances not only because of the good price/performance ratio, but also because they can be integrated into home assistant.

    I think it would be helpful to the discussion if you could explain the following questions:

       Please provide details of WHICH clauses of terms of service does this project violate?
   What is an unauthorized manner?  
   What significant economic harm is being faced by the company? (in terms of dollar figures)
   When did these projects violate your intellectual property?

    I’m sorry if some people have gone over the top, but this doesn’t have to escalate and there doesn’t have to be a bad reputation for your brand in the open source community.

    Can we find a common solution here? Can I do something to make the plugins use the API more economically? Should we reduce the polling? I would like to release a new version that uses the API in a way that does not harm your business. You can also consider an official home assistant integration, the home assistant guys would like to get in touch with you for that. This would be a great competitive advantage within the smart home community.

    I hope to get an answer and until then I’ll leave the repos online.

    Andre

    • racemaniac@startrek.websiteEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I love his reply, but i’m afraid history so far has shown that supporting open platforms is not a competitive advantage. The number of hackers like us in the smart home market is negligable. Proper closed platforms rake in the big money, and the public loves it… Add on some cloud integration & a subscription to functionalities that would take a home assistant user not much time to set up, and you’ve got something the average customer seems to want…

      Still a shit (and probably without any real legal basis) attempt by Haier, but if they’re actually aiming at a walled smart home system, from an economical perspective they’re probably right… And i hate that they’re right…

  • 4am@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Some enterprising engineer should start selling replacement control boards for these units. Like, drop-in, solder-on clones with 100% open source control firmware, linked with an ESP32. Zigbee/Zwave/Wifi+MQTT. I don’t mind, I’ll buy their unit and throw out their shitty controller. They’re not gonna DRM the compressor, are they?

    Hell, if someone does that I’d consider opening a shop where I flip “refurbished” units with the open source board in em.

  • jaschen@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    When will companies learn that you don’t fuck with developers.

  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Not that it likely matters much but I sent them an email saying I would never purchase one of their products based on this anti-consumerism.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Amazing. Let’s truly take it from their point of view.

    The only people who care about this plugin are HomeAssistant users, so a very small subset. Those users then either

    A) Already own the product, and thus are not going to cost them anything because they already bought it or B) Home Assistant users who are in the market for their product, and from experience will only buy a product if there’s an HA plugin.

    In what way are they losing “millions” to these 2 groups again?

    I have literally made decisions on purchases like vehicles on if they have a home assistant plugin or not. For HomeAssitant users it’s one of the largest factors.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      It is insanely petty. Perhaps they don’t want people reverse engineering their APIs, but all their competitors and threat actors likely do it, just not on a public repo.

    • utopiah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      I’m in nearly B as I usually only buy things with proper protocols, e.g Zigbee, that might not need a dedicated plugin. So obviously Haier is now a company I won’t buy anything from and will actively not recommend to anything who cares about my opinion on IoT.

  • Xatix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I just used their Feedback form to tell them what a shitty practice that is and that I will never use their products again.

  • nexusband@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Never considered buying Haier anyway, but i am looking specifically for appliances that have HAOS support. So them pulling this shit will put them on my black list for ever. I get why Mazda did it, but the car doesn’t need the app to be useful, i can just ignore that part. But this is an home appliance that looses a big part of it’s usefulness…