Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice
Appliances giant Haier reportedly issued a takedown notice to a software developer for creating Home Assistant integration plugins for the company's home appliances and releasing them on GitHub.
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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.
Tldr, They are going to fight this!
Source: https://github.com/Andre0512/hon/issues/147#issuecomment-1892738060
Their follow-up:
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:
Please provide details of WHICH clauses of terms of service does this project violate? What is an unauthorized manner? What significant economic harm is being faced by the company? (in terms of dollar figures) When did these projects violate your intellectual property?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.
Andre
Dude has a good heart, that's for sure. I hope Haier sees the light.
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....