Luckily I’m insured. I’ve contacted my legal expenses insurance and they’re covering a lawyer for the case. I will seek advice and see how an expert assesses the situation and then proceed.
It’s pretty common for freelance developers to have insurance like this - if I screw up and you get ransonwared, insurance pays for a lawyer to explain the contracts indemnity clause to you using small words
If you have already screwed up, you now get to play The Game of Litigation, where their lawyers try to prove that you are liable for billions of dollars in damages, and your lawyer tries to prove that you aren’t. The way the game works is whoever spends the most on lawyers wins. You’ve got more cash to spend than your clients right?
Most professions where action/inaction can result in damages will have similar insurance. Some insurance firms even specialize in coverage for professionals.
If your profession has an association or similar group, they should be able to help you find those firms if they exist.
Not sure if it’s really the freelance/professional thing others mentioned. Private legal expense insurance (Rechtsschutzversicherung) is fairly common in Germany, so might just be that.
The developer is German, in Germany it’s pretty common to have a Rechtsschutzversicherung. You pay them monthly or yearly and in exchange you can request legal advice from one of their lawyers af any time. It’s pretty neat.
Not getting the downvotes, a lot of those are quite stupid. The Rechtsschutz is basically required if you drive for example, only because of game theory, not because it actually brings anything
Wow, and it is a real lawyer? I e had employers with benefits that sound similar but I think only get things like templates for common documents like wills and contracts that you can get anywhere, or “free” co suits like you can get anywhere.
I actually do phage a upcoming minor legal need this year, and they couldn’t even tell me , using that as an example, what would the benefit cover?
Yes, typically you get to talk to real lawyers. They may not be the best lawyers on the planet, but if you just need some advice, you should be perfectly fine.
It almost assuredly was not escalated to global. I received the same canned answer from them earlier and asked to be put in contact with a person from the European company.
If you poke around, you’ll find that there is no effective way to contact anyone by email unless you’ve got a specific support question with a model number attached, so I sent an email directly to support.ecommerce@haier-europe.com
Will it matter for anything? Probably not. Will at least one guy have to read some stern words about an attack on open source development? Yep, and that’s good enough for me I guess :P
That doesn’t mean the issue wasn’t/won’t be escalated. It might even mean it’s more likely since someone bothered to make a response macro for it, they presumably got more than one or two emails about it. So it’s probably more likely to make it on a “list of issues we saw this week/sprint/month/quarter”.
I am in no way defending their behavior, but API calls will always incur some cost - either in backend resource consumption with “paying” customers, or legitimate costs if they’re relying on AWS infrastructure.
However, like the whole reddit debacle, API usage isn’t always well optimized at the client end, and it can become a negotiation rather than a C&D…unless you’re looking to make a competitor as well.
A few thoughts come to mind… 1) Some of their customers may only be customers because of HA compatibility. 2) HA does not require a cloud API to function - a LAN based solution is usually preferred anyway. 3) There are far more diplomatic ways to approach this issue.
To think, from a business perspective, that any notable portion of their userbase bought the devices with the explicit expectation that it would work with HA would be naive. We’re hobbyists, a niche market, the less-than-1% of their market evaluations. Losing those customers while reducing whatever burden or cost they’re incurring is probably worth it.
HA doesn’t - but while I don’t have any Haier equipment to say, the other smart devices in my house which aren’t either esphome or tasmota don’t connect locally to my devices, but to the vendor cloud API. Ecobee, Wyze, Traeger all do that instead.
Totally agreed. I think AWS API costs are a few cents to the thousand, so a discussion with the developer about the use would be the nice way instead of just kowtowing to the bean counters.
My argument to that would be if we are only a niche segment then where is the serious economic harm they are referring to? It sounds to me like API calls are happening either way but they don’t want to lose out on the ad and customer tracking revenue. Also, I as other have pointed out there is no reason it needs a remote cloud to change the thermostat.
It could be a case of disproportionate impact - consider that forecasting within Haier for their cloud API would probably be based upon X number of units in the field and Y number of average API calls per unit/user/premises. At 40,000 units in the field at 1000 calls per day (which they know because they designed the software, or at least had a hand in resourcing discussions), you have 40,000,000 calls per day.
If you have some third party app which is generating 4,000,000 calls by itself, and you see only 400 users doing this, then it’s a simple high usage target to hit.
Ad revenue, maybe. Tracking is still possible because it’s the same device, and if there’s any security at all, they’ll still have all the native API stuff they’d normally get, temperatures, weather, occupancy, etc.
I will say at a brief glance at the repo for the project that there’s some calls which imply it would get the local IP for the device, and may from there be able to issue calls direct to the device. That would make me think there’s only a few calls to their cloud to establish a relationship and product info, so the disproportionate load theory, barring bugs, doesn’t hold up. While it’s been a good brain exercise, we’ll be left guessing, and hoping Haier decides to be better.
I liked him for awhile, it was informative stuff. But the last year or so it’s just complaining all the time. Not just about how companies treat us, but just everything. I just don’t need all that negative energy, so I unsubbed. It’s not really anything that everyone else isnt reviewing already anyway. You won’t miss anything.
Being informative is one part to let people know what was going on, but I feel like the biggest part of his “bitching” is actually being one of the larger voices pushing for right-to-repair and consumer protection. And with that came new bills/laws that even Apple and Google are backing.
His messages are/sound aggressive because they are. We need that passion to actually implement change.
Looking at their twitter this is haier Europe and haier US doesn’t block home assistant at all. I assume these repos are specific to haier Europe though.
They share a brand for mutual benefit. As far as I’m concerned, they can take the Electrolux and pyrex route and share the mutual pain of the other side being overly capitalist.
Haier & GE in the US can rebrand if they don’t like the attention.
I’m trying to remember which company it was that sued their foreign trademark licensee because the partner chose to use inferior parts. The argument they used was that the partner damaged the global brand. It might not be relevant if the licensor is the one that’s messing up here.
Any idea what the consequence is if the author instead transferred ownership entirely to an owner based in a country that would give no fucks about a lawsuit? Sure, the OG owner loses the project but would he avoid culpability?
Anyone that wants to take the legal heat can just fork the projects and continue hosting it. I don’t blame the original developer for not wanting to deal with it, even if the legal threat sounds very ridiculous (a project like this would be the opposite of financial harm, how many of us check if something works with home assistant before buying a device?).
I sent them a nasty gram from their contacts page. I don’t own anything from them right now but you can damn well bet I will avoid them if when/if it comes up.
I pointed them to Louis’ video also
I assume a zero chance of any purchases is a larger economic hit than allowing a small diy community to interact with their PURCHASED and OWNED product.
I didn’t go nasty, but did do my bit to point out how short sighted this move was:
I just wanted to say that your silly take down notice on the Home Assistant developer, who was enabling greater satisfaction for customers who bought your products, was a perfect example of the Streisand effect in action: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
Thanks to you, I (who didn’t own - and now probably never will - any of your products), am not only aware of your silly, unethical, and pointless behaviour, but have now taken steps to preserve the developer’s code for future use.
You could’ve fostered this innovation, and gained yourselves the admiration of global, active and thriving community of like-minded people. And potentially gained more paying customers in the process.
Instead, you have achieved the opposite. Well done.
It won’t make a lick of difference, but hopefully they get the same sentiment enough times that they at least understand what a fuck-up this was, on their part.
Nasty was probably strong word. I mostly expressed my disappointment and that I would steer clear going forward. And that would have a stronger economic impact on their bottom dollar.
Yeah - they need to hear this a lot. They could absolutely have taken a little time to understand what need the dev was filling here. Ultimately, this could’ve been a free kick for them, had they handled it the right way.
I’ve just done the same thing, said I don’t own any of their products but I certainly won’t be buying them in the future and I will be actively discouraging people from buying their products, which will actually hurt their profits, and also put a snide little PS at the bottom saying "Good luck issuing cease and desist notices to the hundreds of forks of the software (803 so far according to another post) which will cost you real money instead of the made up MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that you claim this is open source software is costing you. It’s companies like you that make buying consumer electronics a quagmire
Some are actually welcoming, and provide a local API. That way your air-conditioning control isn’t web dependent.
Unfortunately, most are quite stupid about it, and insist on using their app. This voids any usefulness of having smart appliances. E.g. pulse a light in a room when the tumble dryer finishes or turn it on and off dependent on your rooftop solar’s output.
Lazy would be a better description. They want the tech cred of having it be an IoT device. They also hope to leverage it to get more money. Unfortunately, the budget, and coherent drive for this isn’t there. The end result is a “designed by committee” app. It ticks all the boxes, but also misses all the things that would help actually get people using it.
Sad, isn’t it? For fun, look up Whirlpool, Albertsons, and Kroger on Wikipedia to see all the brands they own. No wonder prices are high when so much competition has been eliminated.
Nope, they are not, at least in terms of household appliances. BUT they still produce quality stuff in Germany and Europe. And they actually never have been separate. And HomeConnect is commited to HAOS, iirc they actually provide some code to the plugin.
I was happy to see earlier, the developer commented the following:
Luckily I’m insured. I’ve contacted my legal expenses insurance and they’re covering a lawyer for the case. I will seek advice and see how an expert assesses the situation and then proceed.
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:
<span style="color:#323232;"> Please provide details of WHICH clauses of terms of service does this project violate?
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> What is an unauthorized manner?
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> What significant economic harm is being faced by the company? (in terms of dollar figures)
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> When did these projects violate your intellectual property?
</span>
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.
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…
homeassistant
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.