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!
We're discussing this over in [email protected]. This absolutely has to be about them losing access to data they can sell to 3rd parties. The hOn ToS will no doubt have a clause that enables this.
It's a dick move for sure.
And so they can't possibly actually do anything right? This is just a scare letter?
They probably can. I'm sure they've covered themselves with some bullshit ToS that governs the use of the cloud service itself, and acceptance is implied when you use the service.
There's a part of me that really wishes it could be challenged, though, by pointing out that leaving the cloud service open to public consumption without some form of authorization should simply be a case of tough titties to them. Lock your shit down if you don't want people like us using it in ways you didn't intend.
But, as we all well know, once lawyers get involved, it's simply too hard to fight this sort of shit.
Genuine question, since the code itself doesn't infringe on IP (I think) wouldn't the user executing the code be responsible for accepting the tos, not the repo.
The repo is just static non-compiled text files, it afaik isn't actually communicating with their servers and therefore wouldn't be able to accept any tos (implied or otherwise) (I don't know if there are any actions, ci/cd pipelines, or deployments that would be in violation though)
I think it's because the dev might've reverse-engineered the calls to the cloud service, and that may be where the legal sticking point is. Not a lawyer, so not 100% sure - will be interesting to see where this goes.
I saw elsewhere the dev has insurance, and they're going to cover a lawyer, so they may very well fight it.
As a writer of software code and also of contacts (freelancer), I’m intrigued by the challenge of writing a TOS to prevent reverse-engineering an API.
In some way you’d have to represent the interface itself as the intellectual property, or something. Normal copyright covers copies, but this would be sort of like covering complementary parts. Like you invented a lock, and you’re trying to copyright or protect the set of keys that could open that lock.
The only way to stop the advancement of legal red tape is for people to consciously, willingly decide to take legal risks.
The reasons lawyers take over everything is because we do everything they tell us to do. Their job is to minimize our legal risk, and by doing everything they tell us to, we put legal risk at the highest level of priority in our own decision-making.
A conscious decision to, say, take the risk of a lawsuit or something, is the only way to be free of lawyers’ control.