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Comment by CyanLite2 | Hacker News Reader

Sol-Ark’s markup is like 5x the list price just for the official rebadged version. Sol-Arks (“US veteran owned company”) still have the firmware made in China, and are susceptible to Chinese hackers, and had to be bought through a distributor. So naturally people went with off-listed Deye inverters because of the scheningans from Sol-Ark.

Now, people are without power and they have to go to Sol-Ark to get power restored, likely by paying through the nose.

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That's one way to frame it. Another is Sol-ark incurs costs of developing, marketing and supporting their official devices and the contract manufacturer is able to sell their own version in the Chinese market. Greedy people who don't want to pay Sol-ark for all the costs they incurred bought grey market devices that Sol-ark has repeatedly warned are in contract violation in this market. The manufacturer, not Sol-ark, has now bricked those devices, and people are blaming Sol-ark anyway because they want to continue to justify their actions.

If the people are buying directly from manufacturer, why should any costs that Sol-ark has incurred be their concern? They aren't using the official devices, so they aren't enjoying any advantages of that, either.

Because the manufacturer doesn’t want to support people in the US market, which is why they bricked the devices.

Why should the manufacturer be concerned you tried to skirt the region restrictions they were very upfront exist?

But if they hadn’t broken the devices, the devices would have continued to work fine.

So, companies like the free market when it suits them, but want regional monopolies (without providing any value) when it benefits the consumer. Interesting.

It does make one wonder why these exclusivity agreements exist.

If Sol-Ark is adding value and competitive differentiation, wouldn't that justify the price premium over the basic Deye product? Especially if Deye is not willing to offer its own support/warranty to customers?

Why does Sol-Ark need to create a more monopolistic landscape? Not being judgemental, genuinely curious. (Well, I know why Sol-Ark wants it. I guess the question is why we allow it).

Because those costs were incurred with the plan to recoup the cost from sales in the US, and (presumably) those people are bypassing the licensed sale/use; which ruins that plan.

Your question is really no different than asking why it's not legal for me photocopy books and ignore copyright.

The problem is they already took the money and basically broke it after the fact. Typically there’s all sorts of legal protections protecting against something like that.

Why should we as a society enable plans and business models that hinge on taking away consumer freedom to get the product from the most competitive supplier instead of the one who wants to milk an artificial monopoly?

It was my understanding that the company they bought it from didn't have the rights to sell it in the US. As such, there's no real difference between buying from them and buying from someone that stole it and sold it to you.

Now, you can argue that country-specific licenses shouldn't be allowed; but they currently are.

I think most people can see the obvious ethical difference between actually stealing something vs breaking an exploitative license like that, and react accordingly.

If I can just break into your house can I just take your stuff? It's not my problem you worked to earn it.

I fail to see how the device purchased from Deye by someone can in any way, shape or form be considered Sol-Ark's house and stuff.

Grey market is a term that needs to be erased from the lexicon.

Unfortunately, it is an accurate and necessary term. Because while you might think that you are free to buy and resell anything you want without problem, the courts have made the issue much more grey than black and white. see the Omega v Costco lawsuit for an example.

I would expect a vigorous effort to reverse engineer Solark's firmware to spin up, assuming it hasn't already.

My experience with this class of Chinese manufactured inverters are that they all use TI TMS320F28xxx series DSPs and usually without any protection fuses burnt. If you look hard enough you should also be able to find unencrypted firmware and flash it with the standard TI tooling.

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