Haier hits Home Assistant plugin dev with takedown notice

The two subject repos are:

  https://github.com/Andre0512/hon
  https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn

Make whatever use of that information you will before the takedown occurs.

Hardware companies don't understand how software works. To them, it's just something you pay a low-wage grunt to produce to an exacting specification written by an EE.

Doing what you suggest would require them to respect software enough to bring it in as a discipline alongside mechanical and electrical engineering.

> We are writing to inform you that we have discovered two Home Assistant integration plug-ins developed by you [...] that are in violation of our terms of service

> Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized manner, which is causing significant economic harm to our Company.

> We take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously and demand that you immediately cease and desist all illegal activities related to the development and distribution of these plug-ins.

They seem to be threatening legal action because he is violating their terms of service? This doesn't make much sense to me

This is stupid and just like Chamberlain with their MyQ snafu [1]. Assuming the developer did not steal the code, then this sort of work should be protected. If you have a public API, people should be legally allowed to use it and work against it. If you as a company don't like that, then make it harder for 3rd parties. If the open source code is abusive, then use a freaking WAF to protect yourself. But unless they are hacking yours system, stealing code, or being intentionally abusive there should be no legal recourse here.

Or... better yet, engage with these clearly VERY passionate customers. This is someone who not only bought your product but has donated hundreds or thousands of hours of their free time to making your product better. Better how? Because its works in a way your customers want that you don't otherwise offer. Instead of demanding take down, file a bug report with them to explain how the code is misbehaving. Bugs happen, maybe the developer didn't include an exponential fall off for outages. Whatever. Let them know and they'll probably fix it. Heck, you could use one of the in house developers to file a pull request to fix it yourself.

That's how you be the good guys. Instead of stomping on small projects of passionate customers, you engage with them. Make them even more a fan of your product, rather than a lifetime hater.

[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/11/06/removal-of-myq...

This is like suing somebody for using chopsticks to eat a meal you sold them. Where is the financial damage? Do they sell their own automation products? Even if that's the case, and they're fork-sellers on the side in my analogy, there's absolutely no good to come from suppressing these plugins.