Dear Andre,
I'm Gianpiero Morbello, serving as the Head of IOT and Ecosystem at Haier Europe.
It's a pleasure to hear from you. We just received your email, and coincidentally, I was in the process of sending you a mail with a similar suggestion.
I want to emphasize Haier Europe's enthusiasm for supporting initiatives in the open world. Please note that our IOT vision revolves around a three-pillar strategy:
achieving 100% connectivity for our appliances,
opening our IOT infrastructure (we are aligned with Matter and extensively integrating third-party connections through APIs, and looking for any other opportunity it might be interesting),
and the third pillar involves enhancing consumer value through the integration of various appliances and services, as an example we are pretty active in the energy management opening our platform to solution which are coming from energy providers.
Our strategy's cornerstone is the IOT platform and the HON app, introduced on AWS in 2020 with a focus on Privacy and Security by Design principles. We're delighted that our HON connected appliances and solutions have been well-received so the number of connected active consumers is growing day after day, with high level of satisfaction proven by the high rates we receive in the App stores.
Prioritizing the efficiency of HON functions when making AWS calls has been crucial, particularly in light of the notable increase in active users mentioned above. This focus enables us to effectively control costs.
Recently, we've observed a substantial increase in AWS calls attributed to your plugin, prompting the communication you previously received as standard protocol for our company, but as mentioned earlier, we are committed to transparency and keenly interested in collaborating with you not only to optimize your plugin in alignment with our cost control objectives, but also to cooperate in better serving your community.
I propose scheduling a call involving our IOT Technology department to address the issue comprehensively and respond to any questions both parties may have.
Hope to hear back from you soon.
Best regards
Gianpiero Morbello
Head of Brand & IOT
Haier Europe
If only they would have reached out this way the first time instead of a cease and desist, their brand getting dragged through the mud could have been avoided.
Yes, it is damage control. That’s OK.
The whole point of spreading the word about an incident like this is to get public attention on it, and make the company realize that the way they’ve handled things was bad.
A letter like this indicates that they’ve realized they fucked up and they want to do things differently going forward. That doesn’t mean they’re suddenly trustworthy, but it does mean they can be negotiated with.
The correct response is to accept the offer of working together. We want to encourage companies to be cooperative and discourage insular, proprietary behavior. If you slap away the offered hand then you discourage future cooperation, and now you’re the roadblock to developing an open system.
When you start getting the results that you want, don’t respond with further hostility.
Exactly this. I understand the cynicism, but it ultimately doesn’t matter what the motivation of a company walking back a poor decision is. We take the chance for mutual collaboration and hopefully everyone benefits.
On an individual level, that’s when people can evaluate if they still want to boycott and do whatever their own moral compass demands. But refusing to work together at this point just means we definitely don’t get the chance in the future to steer things in a better direction.
And even if the cooperation doesn’t last, it’s an opportunity for the open source developers to work with the product engineers and get direct information from them right now. There’s nothing as valuable as talking to the guy that actually designed the thing, or the guy who can make changes to the product code.
Even if that relationship doesn’t hold long term, the information gathered in the short term will be useful.
If I were part of this project this is what I’d be going for. Push the company to give you direct contact with the relevant engineers, right now while the negative public opinion is fresh and they’re most willing to make concessions, and then get as much out of that contact as you can. Take them at their word, make them actually back it up, take advantage of the offer to cooperate. Sort the rest of it out later.
Nope.
They’re on the ropes.
Keep pummeling them. There’s no integrity behind this, and going along will just let them get away with their bad behaviour.
They played the “We’ll sue your ass off” card first. That means it’s already in the legal realm, they never even triedto work with the OSS community, they basically said “fuck you” until the community replied, very clearly.
Had the community not responded by replicating the repo 1000+ times, and making a story about it, they would’ve continued down the path of slapping the little guy around.
They now realize they can’t compete with potentially 1000 people working on this, against them. They also fear they’ve pissed off some technophile who has some serious skills or connections. Wonder if they saw a sudden increase in probes on their internet interfaces.
Make it hurt. Let them be the cautionary tale.