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.
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)
If Haier is claiming that the integration is causing them financial harm it means that their app is collecting your private data and they are selling it.
I think what's funnier about this is that most home assistant users make purchasing choices based on support in home assistant. So anyone that bought one of their units and used it in home assistant would have just bought something else without the support in home assistant being there.
As a result I would think they actually made more money from having that plugin existing.
My man Louis Rossman needs to take a chill-pill and get some sleep. Dudes heart isn't going to last very long. Let someone else take the reigns for a while.
3 days ago they had ~30 forks. It's over 1500 now.
please, don't make a local copy of the repo and/or forks out of github. It'd make it difficult to retake their intellectual property, and nobody wants that.
That isn't clear, but probably not. Though if you are a dev there are some open source charities that exist to defend against things like this, so I'd recommend you go look for one.