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.

cross-posted from: https://poptalk.scrubbles.tech/post/567593

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)

  • gradyp@awful.systemsEnglish
    351·
    10 months ago

    I’m sure the “millions lost” is their theoretical earnings they are “losing” by not being able to monetize the data they collect, spy on users to determine their habits so that they can introduce features that charge for things that are standard today, loss of ad revenue, etc.

    We’ve hit a point where since everything collects as much data as they can to be mined, anything that interrupts that stream is now a felony corruption of business model.

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      10 months ago

      it’s like when they compute losses for pirated content, just assuming every download would be equivalent to a Golden Edition Purchase at the highest price charged in their history, when in reality they’d be lucky to convert 1% of those downloads into sales.