cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10882099
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: !homeassistant@lemux.minnix.dev
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!
The problem is that these projects do connect to the manufacturer’s cloud.
I agree that the company is handling this the wrong way, but it is possible for 3rd-party code to negatively impact the service for other users. The right way to address any legitimate issues would be to have reasonable rate limits and work with the developer to fix any concerns.
This is also why I believe in choosing devices with local control instead of those which require cloud services. For example, Louis’ video mentions air conditioners. Get one that can use a wired thermostat that you control over Z-Wave or ZigBee.
I was lucky enough that my Panasonic unit has a physical connector. It’s meant for you to connect their own little cloud dongle, but some clever bastard on github reverse engineered the RS232-based protocol and wrote an ESPhome component to talk to the AC unit instead. All I had to do was get an ESP32 dev board, a voltage converter and the right type of connector, and solder it all together.
That doesn’t make it any better. I’m guessing that it uses the shitty cloud backend because there is no way to control the AC unit directly. In that case, they should just implement a direct local API and stop bitching about “forbidden usage of their cloud services”.