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.
  • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    9 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
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    9 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.

    • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      9 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

    • helenslunch@feddit.nlEnglish
      0·
      9 months ago

      This is the great thing about FOSS. Someone else will just take the code and reupload it. If they want it removed from GitHub, they can deal with Microsoft. At which point it’ll just be re-uploaded again. There’s nothing illegal about it.

      So Haier suffers the Streisand effect and the people who want to simply continue using it.

      • 1stTime4MeInMCU@mander.xyzEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        Right… they claim hosting it is a violation of their TOS, but I’m not one of their customers. How can I violate their TOS if I don’t even use their product.