I think it’s worth noting that the company which is charging the subscription fee is not the same company that sold the smart hubs: Futurehome declared bankruptcy in May; this fee is being charged by its successor.
And does the bankruptcy even matter, legally? The company had a business/contractual relationship with its customers. Selling that contract/relationship to someone else, even through bankruptcy, does not let them unilaterally alter it. E.g. if they had made promises, contractual or even just in marketing, a change of owner is immaterial to the other side of that contract/promise.
[1] This is not hyperbole, but an accurate description of destroying functionality that did not require company servers.
[2] False advertising is a crime, after all.
Is it ethical? I wouldn't say so, but I do think that is the economic argument.
They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away.
> I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers.
It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with.
Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.
If you had a landscaper mowing your lawn and they die, nobody expects the person who buys the lawnmower at the estate sale to continue mowing everyone's lawn.
This isn't any different just because it is a different type of service. Cloud platforms are services and like any other business, they disappear... a lot.
But forget the analogy.
Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate.
People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves
They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.
The customer didn't buy access to a service with a physical product to serve as support for that service, they purchased functionality, and that functionality is (potentially illegally) being taken away from them.
Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.
Are they? To me it looks like legitimate complaints and only that.
> Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.
It's unique in its illegallity. They're lucky these aren't very expensive products, or people would actually go to court and maybe force the manufacturer's hand for once.
> Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change it at any point.
The user bought the device before ever agreeing to any terms. At that point they're inherently entitled to the advertised functionality, merely by having their money change hands. Any post-sale agreement is separate from the purchase of the product that was informed by the advertisements.
The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.
And that EULA is potentially unconscionable, both procedurally and substantively, both due to the prior purchase that was concluded before any EULA came into the picture and the overall balance of power in the terms, the reason being that users have an inherent legal right to use software that comes with a device they purchased regardless of any later agreement.
I mean, this new company pushed the lockout update and imposed the new terms. If we already assume that the users have the right to the advertised functionality, and that the new company has ties to the consumers by inheriting its contractual relationship with them through the previous company's EULA, it would make the most sense for a court to order them to right their wrong.
Like with Nest going EOL. There's no reason that it needed a wifi connection to operate. The server doesn't hold any useful information and just proxies instructions to your nest device when you use the app.
It would have been nice if rather than wifi being used to communicate with googles' servers, wifi was just used to communicate with your app on your device via the local network. Or bluetooth was available as a fallback.
I’m a nest early adopter affected by the nest EOL. I presume you mean: there’s no reason it needs a cloud service? Because it definitely needs network access for you to connect to it remotely.
But if you are familiar at all with the history of IOT devices, the reason why cloud connected devices took off in popularity, is because they do NAT traversal for you. Most people struggled to set these devices up before the advent of cloud IOT.
It's like if the landscaper tried charging me for using my own lawnmower, myself.
I think the actual answer is that you can't. Just because the technology is there in such a way that it theoretically could, doesn't mean that is actually what you bought.
They prevented that by locking the boxes, and threatened prosecution to someone trying to undo those locks: Futurehome CEO threatens police action after I offer $5,000 bounty to free his ransomed customers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwSkwh3nWv8
If you don't have the firmware source and an unlocked bootloader you're only renting the device.