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: [email protected]
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!
My guess is someone saw what was being built and said "hey, we can build something similar and sell it", hence the C&D.
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.
To be clear, I think the company are idiotic in the way they handled this, but I guess the integration probably hooked into the company's cloud-based services - so their servers.
Bad enough if a air conditioner needs cloud access for smart functions and doesn’t have a local api.
I don't disagree.
Absolutely. I’ll never buy a device like that if I can’t use a local API! I have no IoT devices and refuse, because they sketch me out.
I was this way, then got into home assistant and esphome. Now I have iot things like thermostats, garage door openers, air compressor controller, and know exactly how they work and where their data goes. And none of it leaves it's own network (separate vlan).
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.
This is actually a thing and is called Sherlocking: https://thehustle.co/sherlocking-explained/
Apple is so notorious at doing this, it's not even funny anymore. The article didn't mention these two famous sherlocking cases though:
Except instead of something similar, it's always something way, way worse.
The EU really needs to start doing something about this kind of shit.
The US does too, but fat chance of that happening.