For developing Home Assistant integration plugins for the company’s home appliances and publishing them on Git Hub, Apple giant Haier issued a takedown notice.
Haier is a multinational company that sells consumer electronics and home appliances under the names General Electric Appliances, Hotpoint, Hoover, Fisher &, Paykel, and Candy.
German software developer Andre Basche, who maintains plugins for the Home Assistant integration for Haier’s hOn smart control app, claimed to have received a legal threat earlier this week demanding the immediate removal of his tools from the GitHub platform.
Users can control and automate their smart home devices using Home Assistant, an open-source home automation platform, from a single interface. Home Assistant offers superior security and privacy options that are not available on comparable commercial apps, in addition to convenience and price.
Users can use the Home Assistant plugins provided in the GitHub repositories to control Haier, Candy, and Hoover air conditioners, purifiers. They can also use dishwashers and induction hobs as well as air conditioning, refrigerators or washing machines.
Haier claims that these plugins cause the company significant financial harm and violate copyright laws, requiring the developer to remove them in order to avoid further legal action, according to a notice published by the repository owner.
According to the notice  from the Haier Europe Security and Governance Department,” 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 ://gib.c/andre10512 /pyhOn ) that are in violation of our terms of service.”
” Specifically, the plug-ins are using our services in an unauthorized way, which is seriously harming our company’s financial situation.”
We demand that you immediately stop and desist all illegal activities related to the creation and distribution of these plug-ins because we take the protection of our intellectual property very seriously.
In the end, the letter threatens the developer legally, threatening that the company will take necessary legal action to seek compensation for the harm done to its business if he does n’t comply with the removal request right away.
Although the plugins themselves are open-source, it is unclear if they use Haier’s proprietary protocols or software code, which would give the company a legal foundation for the request.
The creator could, however, choose to defend his work and keep the plugins accessible to the community if they do not violate Haier’s intellectual property or fall under fair use provisions.
However, the developer was intimidated by Haier’s legal threats and declared that the project would be shut down in the coming days.
In the meantime, the circumstance has sparked support for the developer and backlash against Haier, with users urging users to boycott the company because they find its strategy to be overly aggressive.
Targeting open-source software developers has a tendency to backfire for businesses because some people fork or clone the code repositories to keep the projects from going away.
The Haier home assistant plugins have been forked 228 times as of right now, many of them since hearing about the legal threats.
Haier has been contacted by BleepingComputer with inquiries regarding the case, but no comment was immediately available.