Major home appliance manufacturer Haier has issued a license revocation notice to a software developer for creating Home Assistant plugins for the company's home appliances and publishing them on GitHub.
Haier is a multinational home appliance and consumer electronics corporation that sells a wide range of products under the brands General Electric Appliances, Hotpoint, Hoover, Fisher & Paykel and Candy.
German software developer Andre Basche said he has received a legal threat to immediately remove his plugins from the GitHub platform.
Home Assistant is an open source home automation platform that allows users to control and automate smart home devices through a centralized interface. Andre Bachet's Home Assistant plugins allow users to control air conditioners, purifiers, dishwashers, induction cooktops, ovens, refrigerators, Haier, Candy and Hoover washers and dryers.
According to a notice published by the repository owner, Haier claims that these plugins cause significant financial harm to the firm and violate copyright laws, requiring the developer to remove them to avoid further litigation.
We are writing to inform you that we have discovered two Home Assistant integration plug-ins developed by you (https://github.com/Andre0512/hon and https://github.com/Andre0512/pyhOn) that are in violation of our terms of service," reads the notice from Haier Europe Security and Governance Department.
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.
Haier's legal threats scared the developer and he announced that the project would be removed in the next couple of days. Meanwhile, this situation has caused a community backlash against Haier's actions, with users calling on consumers to boycott Haier, considering the company's approach to be overly aggressive. To date, plugin repositories for Haier have been forked 228 times, many of them after news of legal threats surfaced.
Source: linux.org.ru
