The Ad has shown on my locally deployed piece of software that's controlling hardware. It's not SaaS, it's a program for managing physical hardware running on my hardware.
And it has replaced USEFUL information (channel utilization and client counts) with a fullscreen unremovable ad.
How can you defend this crap?
That's not what the article suggests. The article suggests an ad on a page with an ubiquiti url.
While it may be the same software under the hood, I agree that seeing an ad when I'm on someone else's hosted page is (somewhat) acceptable unless I'm a paying customer, but seeing it on my own machine isn't.
In the end since those are two entirely different things and the article seems to be discussing their hosted version, It's important to keep those things apart
If I buy a gadget and use the manufacturers’ cloud service “for free” (apart from the hardware purchase) then I expect anything.
I wouldn’t want to use a cloud service to access what’s on my own hardware. Apart from ease of configuration, what’s the point of it? Why wouldn’t I rather go to my own server?
It's both. UniFi is product line of network hardware which is managed by a central controller. The controller is available as a software download, and Ubiquiti sells a few devices that are pre-configured to run it (the "Dream Machine" from the ad, and their "Cloud Key", which is just a PoE-powered mini-appliance that runs the controller). The controller's UI can be accessed either directly, or via a Ubiquiti-run cloud service. The tweet shows the latter, but having recently upgraded my controller, I can confirm that the ad also appears when directly accessing the UI. What's worse, there's a link offering to go back to the "Classic Dashboard" on my install, but it doesn't appear to work.
This is vital information. This is definitely not okay for practical reasons.