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!
They just don't want to go through the hassle of securing their api, so they're trying to strong arm the devs into dropping the project.
It would be laughably easy for them to kill this, but maybe their devs aren't competent enough to do it.
This seems like the answer. If there is no proprietary code and they did not actually reverse-engineer patented technology, I doubt they have a leg to stand on.
It costs nothing to threaten to sue, and it sometimes works.
afaik reverse engineering is generally legal so long as the person prosecuting you can't prove you used insider knowledge
This is why things like game system emulators are generally fine
Reverse engineering is legal, but if you still arrive at a solution covered by a patent, then that solution is illegal. But this shouldn't be covered by a patent.
Software patents isn't a thing in Europe, so that doesn't hold any weight for Haier. Even their terms are null and void as is the case of almost all "terms of service" documents in Europe.
That wouldn't stop them from pursuing something in a US court if the other party is in the US. But even here, I doubt their argument would hold water in an actual trial, considering existing precedent.
That seems like it would be nearly impossible to prove with software. There are so many ways to structure solutions and most of them conform to an open standard
It's an open source project repository. It can be compared to the process descriptions in the patent. But patents and copyright don't cover APIs, as decided in Oracle vs Google in 2021.
I'm saying this usage of reverse engineering is probably safe, but if you reverse engineered a way to process data that happened to match a patent, it doesn't matter that you never saw the patent or original code, it can still be infringement.
It would still require a lot of time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers.
It wouldn't require that much time or money to lock down the API. It's not something they'd have to create from scratch.
Although I'm sure the entire platform is a mess of spaghetti code, so maybe it would be expensive to have someone untangle it enough to implement.