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@lemmy.world
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!
We're discussing this over in !homeassistant@lemmy.world. This absolutely has to be about them losing access to data they can sell to 3rd parties. The hOn ToS will no doubt have a clause that enables this.
It's a dick move for sure.
They want to advertise that their stuff is "cloud enabled", while offering the shittiest service possible and putting as many roadblocks as possible to minimize its use.
Having people use their services efficiently is increasing their cloud services bill, can't have that.
Personally, I've restrained myself from buying into IoT, and if I'm going to do so, I'll make sure it can be controlled locally without depending on a cloud service, and through a hub I can fully control. I need to be able to disconnect my modem and operate everything even if the WAN is down.
I basically run my house IoT setup as you desire. My smart switches are a mix of Tasmota (open source firmware, running totally locally) and ZigBee (an open protocol for IoT interoperability). The whole lot is controlled by a NUC running home assistant. My doorbell camera also streams directly to the server.
Home Assistant basically acts to glue everything together, and provides nice, easy to use GUIs. It can also bridge between networks. It's easy to have all your IoT things on an isolated network, with no internet access. Only the HA install can see both networks.
I've also been careful of WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). If the internet goes down, almost everything keeps working. If the NUC dies, the switches still work as dumb switches. The bulbs all default to full brightness neutral colour.
What doorbell camera do you use?
Reolink PoE
https://m.reolink.com/gb/product/reolink-video-doorbell/
Thanks!