Haier, the air conditioner maker, takes down open source third-party Home Assistant integration

Dehydrated@lemmy.world to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 648 points –

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10882099

Thankfully I don't use any of their products, but this really pisses me off. They claim that this open source project "causes significant economic harm to their company"

This is ridiculous. It is truly ridiculous. How can something that enables the user to efficiently control their AC cause "significant economic harm"???

Consider forking the repository or mirroring it to another platform like GitLab, Codeberg or your self-hosted Git server, so the project can continue to exist and someone can maybe fork it and maintain it.

The effected repos are: https://github.com/Andre0512/hOn and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn

If you don't know about Home Assistant, check it out. It's an amazing piece of open-source software, that you can run at home on your own server and use it to control your smart home devices. That way, you don't need to connect them to the manufacturer's (probably insecure) cloud. It gives you sovereignty over your smart home instead of some proprietary vendor-locked garbage. Check out their website and the Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world

I also highly recommend Louis Rossmann's video about this: https://youtu.be/RcSnd3cyti0

He makes awesome videos in general, consider subscribing.

As Rossmann said, don't ever buy anything from such a shitty company that doesn't respect their customers. This move by Haier is nothing other than a slap in the face for everyone, who just wants to comfortably control the product they paid for. This company is actively hostile towards their paying customers. Fuck these bastards!

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How is the plugin illegal?

It's not like a judge said it's illegal... what happened is that a huge multinational company sent a menacing letter to a developer regarding their hobby project, and the developer —understandably— decided to comply.

Yeah, even though the claim is 1000% horseshit, it’s not like some small time python dad has the means to defend against a giant multinational in court.

Laws are only for the common man.

The developer has not yet fully complied - the repo is still up, they have legal insurance and are in discussion with lawyers, and they have responded requesting clarification on the specifics of their alleged "violation".

In the mean time, I think many people have reached out to Haier to express their displeasure. On an unrelated note, the original menacing letter came from cybergovernance@haier-europe.com in case anyone was curious.

Ask those brain dead fucks at Haier

It sounds like someone out of their jurisdiction should host the repos and tell them to pound sand.

Codeberg is hosted in Germany

Pretty sure the maintainer is in Germany so that wouldn’t help (unless you meant something else by your comment)