Still a ridiculous move. If I buy an appliance, I pay for it and I own it. I am allowed to do with it whatever I want. If I want to use my own solution for controlling it, hosted on my own server, I should have every right to do so. Fuck corporations and their shitty cloud solutions.
The Apple iOS method. See a great app or product on your platform. If they won’t sell it or want to much Apple just makes their own version and prohibits the original.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When it actually backfires. Right now, no company was actually hurt by doing stuff like this - quite the opposite, they get a boost since they close down their ecosystem further forcing people to buy their stuff.
There will be “boycotts” but in reality it will blow over in two to four weeks, with people forgetting “an outrage” that didn’t reach 99% of their target users at all.
I haven’t seen such a list. But GitHub maintains a repo at github.com/github/dmca with all the DMCA notices they receive. And also, fuck Mazda as well for taking down innocent FOSS projects. Simply for this reason, I’m never buying any of their cars. There are enough other car makers on the market.
“Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company.”
Presumably, they don’t charge customers extra for hOn, so surely the only people using it via HA are the same people that would otherwise have used their (presumably) shitty app that isn’t meeting the customers’ needs in the first place?
Not clear on how this causes them “significant” economic harm. Dick move.
Yeah - in an ideal world, the dev would have the means (and legal standing) to challenge this, just to force the fuckers to admit it in court.
Not that it isn’t written into their ToS somewhere - just would love them to admit exactly how that harms them so much, financially speaking. Shine a light on the whole thing.
The only way I see a company like this having “significant economic harm” from you not using their free app is if 1) they eventually plan to charge a fee to use the app or 2) they profit from data their app collects about you (third party data sales, for example).
Not something I’m interested in either way, so they’ve lost a potential customer.
Looking at the brands they already own, it’s not hard to picture a future where they’ll own a brand I want to buy.
Although, I’m really interested (and haven’t done reading up on hOn yet) - just what level of automation are people looking for on their appliances? I used smart plugs with current measurements, so I can easily get HA to just tell me when my washing machine or dishwasher are finished.
One of the problems with the cloud-polling integrations is that they will frequently poll the back-end APIs to get the current status of that device. A normal user might only open up the app once or twice a day and call the APIs, but these integrations will go 24/7 every 10s-5m. That can add up to a non-trivial amount of traffic. If there’s 100 users opening it up once a day, that’s not a lot of traffic, but 10 users polling every 1 minute is equivalent to 15k people doing something once a day.
I actually saw one of my integrations I used defaulted to updating every 10 seconds. I decreased that because I didn’t want to draw attention to it.
A business will look at their usage and ask why there’s more than expected traffic. They could be running their server on a potato. They could go back and support Matter, that costs money, requires skilled engineers, and cuts into profit margins.
While it sucks, that is something they could point to in a court about “economic harm”.
I reckon it’s probably not that much. There has to be tens of thousands of customers worldwide that are using their shitty app.
Forks and stars on the original repo numbered only in the hundreds.
Cloud services and API gateways usually charge once you get into the millions of requests. Amazon API Gateway doesn’t even charge for having the APIs active - only for the requests that are received and the data transferred out.
I’m finding it very difficult to believe a few hundred HA users even came close to putting a dent in their cloud bill.
An F&P induction range was on our short list for an upcoming replacement to our aging gas range. It is now off the short list. Not sure how many API calls a $8000 range would have paid for, but I’m sure they’ll be happy to know my HA server won’t be pinging them any time soon.
Based on the verbiage of the threat from haier it kinda sounds like they don’t have a leg to stand on. Short of just the financial cost of fighting this blatantly bullshit lawsuit should they file one. The TOS isn’t the law, so to demand the devs to cease all illegal activities means nothing here.
You are right, TOS isn’t the law. However businesses will try to trick you with this technique, especially if they don’t think you have any legal support. You can’t commit a crime just because the victim agreed to it, no amount of contracts negate this. Employers often pull this trick to force employees to accept illegal practices.
The person hosting and publishing the code may have never agreed to the TOS. So can’t be bound by it. They also can revoke their agreement, and no longer have to comply with it. However, continued use of the businesses web services likely requires agreeing to the TOS and this plug in may be using the businesses web services to make the plugin work.
This is sad to see. I have a hOn device which I recently connected to WiFi to see what features it would have. Sadly it had to connect to the internet to work so I didn’t play with it too much. I checked this plug-in out then and was hoping I could use it.
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.
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.
A stepper would be the easiest thing because if you know it takes 10 steps to fully open from fully closed, you could keep track of how many steps you have sent each direction in Home Assistant and be able to display the current status. 
If you want a knob on the wall that controls this, I think somewhere behind it you are still going to need a control system that translates wall switch inputs into stepping logic. Home Assistant would be able to do that easily. 
I feel like your best bet is ESPHome and the ESP family of devices. Last time I checked you could get the parts for a project like this off Amazon (with spare parts) for under 20$.
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