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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If it’s anything like my setup (posted in the thread) they’ll have a colder spot in the house, whereas the thermostat is in a warm part of the house.
My Nest heats to 22 degrees C but the whole house temp is a couple degrees lower than that.
When the whole house temp hits 20 the heating is switched off, but looking at the thermostat you’d think we’re heating the house to a silly temp, when in fact there’s a disparity between the thermostat temp and the temp of the whole house.
No, it really is 25° in the two rooms this unit heats up. 🦎
With that said, the temperature rarely falls below 25°C due to the heat coming off of the neighbouring units in the building, unless I open the window. 🥹
Do either of you know what entity is being used for weather? I use openweathermap for my weather entities, but none of them provide a nice image of the weather like in the picture above
Maybe a template sensor over the openweathermap_forecast_condition state? You can pretty easily have a template change its icon, and mdi: has all the icons built in.
Here’s a template I use for current condition in a card, but it should work similarly for the forecast. Or works just need to be applied to the icon of a template sensor.
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 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…
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