cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/567593
Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
I’m not really big on “let’s make a movement”, but this independent dev has been hit with a cease-and-desist from making a FOSS Home Assistant addon for their Haier air conditioners.
Haier claims that they are losing out on millions of dollars due to this plugin which… lets you control their air conditions from home assistant. They haven’t bothered to explain how that’s possibly worth millions of dollars - they’re just claiming it.
So of course they hit the Streisand button and are demanding that he takes it down. He of course is complying… in a couple of days. Maybe you see where this is going.
It would be an absolute shame if any of you just happened to create a fork, or clone the code, or mirror it in your own instance. An absolute shame.
Just so everyone here knows which repositories NOT to clone or fork, here are the two links:
and please, don’t repost this anywhere, or share it in other communities, or anything like that. It’s a shame that so many people already know and are making clones. I’m just letting you know so you don’t do anything like telling others who may make their own copies.
(sidenote: Haier owns GE Appliance, so for our American folks it may affect you folks too)
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Why does that building look like a failed print?
I was gonna say air filter.
A royally abused heat pump.
I wonder if their notice is not absolute nonsense. They talk about breaches of their terms of service, which I think can be found here: https://go.he.services/tc/V1/en_GB/tc.html
The terms of service do purport to prohibit ‘reverse engineering’ of the app, which I think the developer receiving the notice may have done to understand the protocol between Haier’s service and the app. However, it looks like the developer is in Germany, and did the reverse engineering for the purpose of creating something that, in a way, competes with the app. According to https://www.twobirds.com/en/insights/2020/germany/vertraglicher-ausschluss-von-reverse-engineering, contractual provisions in Germany designed to prevent reverse engineering to create a competing independent program after the original is already available to the public are not valid.
Maybe they are saying that the developer is unlawfully interfering with their business by inducing others to breach the contract. However, the terms of service don’t appear to say prohibit connecting to Haier’s services from a competing act (at least nothing in them I can find).
They don’t really clearly define what their problem / claimed cause of action is. Maybe this is just an intimidation tactic against something they don’t like, but they have no real legal case - in which case perhaps the community around it could band together to create a legal defence fund, and have Haier laughed out of court.
Disclaimer: Not intended as legal advice.
Edit: And better yet would be if they could find a way to intercept the traffic between the devices and Haier and replace Haier in that protocol. Then there is no option for Haier to try to restrict who can use the servers on their side. I assume the devices have a set of Certificate Authorities they trust, and it is not possible to get a trusted certificate without modifying the device somehow though.
I’d suggest not buying anything from Haier. I had a fridge from them, and it barely lasted 5 years. I used their official service programme to try and get it fixed (so as to try to get it sorted without them blaming the fridge, and the manufacturer blaming the repairs), and even the person they sent out (who didn’t exclusively work for Haier but was part of their repair programme), recommended getting another fridge, and making the next one a brand other than Haier.
The fact that they are now claiming that letting consumers control their own appliances harms the company just shows how out of touch they are with what their consumers want - and definitely reaffirms to me that this is not a brand worth buying.
1.3K forks already lol
Please remember to fork it outside github. They will probably delete all forks based on intellectual property bs written in their TOS.
Gittea, codeberg, Self-Hosted gog, src.ht… have I missed any?
My thoughts exactly. I still remember when the reversed engineered codes for the classic GTAs were out (RE3), all GitHub forks were quickly taken down.
I’m sure the “millions lost” is their theoretical earnings they are “losing” by not being able to monetize the data they collect, spy on users to determine their habits so that they can introduce features that charge for things that are standard today, loss of ad revenue, etc.
We’ve hit a point where since everything collects as much data as they can to be mined, anything that interrupts that stream is now a felony corruption of business model.
it’s like when they compute losses for pirated content, just assuming every download would be equivalent to a Golden Edition Purchase at the highest price charged in their history, when in reality they’d be lucky to convert 1% of those downloads into sales.
Nobody has the intention to fork and clone opensource projects to keep them alive. :)
Within 5 hours yesterday, the github repo was forked nearly 1000 times.
yeah, it was glorious!
Careful I hope this doesn’t spark a war with them going after HA devs to block the use of the code in HA. I know there isn’t much they can do to block it but I would hate the devs having to try to fight a lawsuit.
Naw, once they get their lawyer heads out of their asses, they’ll go directlp to Github and have all of the forks removed.
It’s unofficial and 3rd party, by that logic any OS could be sued.
I am worried about frivolous suits ones just used to punish people that can’t afford to fight.
You’re right, even if you could win, countless huge companies will steamroll you.
Too bad they own Hoover as well
Can’t wait for them to learn all about the Streisand Effect. I had been considering them for a new mini split system, but not anymore.
The plug in has already received like a 1000 forks its awesome, to me that’s Streisand effect. Hopefully people forked off github like someone else said. They may remove all IP stuff
I know they are not the best but I put in Mr cool and then ditched their dongle for one built with esphome. Now I have total local control and native Home Assistant control.
Woah I would never do it and would never tell you that I did it because I 100% didn’t do it. The fact there are two new repos in my github is totally a coincidence.
If you don’t have a local copy you’re likely to lose it.
And I thought Chamberlain was bad for intentionally breaking MyQ integrations. This is downright absurd. I guess Haier can lose some more potential business.
I’m still so upset about Chamberlain disabling my smart garage with all that (I’m not about to use their damn app).
Thankfully the open source community have reverse engineered something but still, now I have to spend $40 because Chamberlain got butt hurt that people didn’t want to use their app.
https://github.com/PaulWieland/ratgdo
I just installed a ratgdo as well because of this. It’s great but shouldn’t have been necessary for the reasons you state.
Good to know which company should be avoided for buying home appliances. I really hope the notice will be the first thing to show ope when you search their name + HA Integration.
All the HVAC control systems are anti-opensource. They pretend like their proprietary controls are trade secrets worth billions in research and development, but ultimately they are all just glorified mercury switches. Honeywell, Johnson, Mitsubishi, Schneider, Trane, Siemens, none of them want to allow third party control without getting their beaks wet with licensing fees. Even their commercial departments have started phasing out support for protocols like BACNet and Modbus.
Temperature sensors are cheap as shit. Low voltage relays are cheap as shit. Even digitally controlled zone dampers shouldn’t cost more than $100 installed. If you can access your ventilation in your attic or basement, you could zone every room in your house for less than it costs to replace a single AC compressor, and run it all on a raspberry pi.
But you need to know what you’re doing, and they will throw every hurdle in your way. No contractors would risk drawing the ire of their suppliers by doing it for you.
Several Venstar thermostat models feature local API and work great with Home Assistant
The Honeywell HomeAssistant integration works pretty well, and has been around for a while, but it works through a web API. I’d prefer to have a fully local connection, but I’m not going to replace the entire HVAC control system to get it.
Sounds like a market opportunity. Would be super disruptive
How does this cause them “significant economic harm?” My immediate thought is they are losing out on data or ads, hence it being a privacy concern.
It could be poorly optimized or non-ideally programmatically poking their service.
But instead of working with devs or releasing a real API they did this shit.