I Made A 3rd Party Software After The Original Company Said They Were Not Going To.

Location: Arkansas TLDR: I made a software to control another company devices after they told me they had no plans to improve their own and would not give me the tools for me to do it easily. Now other people want to buy my software.

I have bought hundreds of pieces of equipment from this company and they give a bare bones hard to use super restricted even with the highest tier subscription software. I asked them if they were working on a better software to control theses devices, they gave a boilerplate " its hard, we are a big company, we got other issues ahead of it." Response. I then asked if I could have the api and firmware data so I could work on my own software. They said no and they would not give it out.

I have to touch this software everyday and I wanted something better because we already spent so much money on them we couldnt just move easily. So I opened wireshark, watched the traffic move from the server controller to the devices. Basicly reverse engineered how they communicate and wrote up my own locally hosted website to manage all of the devices. Its been over a year and iv added so many extra features to make my day to day so much better.

Recently another company with my same issue reached out and we started talking about what I did. And they want to pay me to install the software for them.

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I nolonger use the main companies server or software to controller the devices. I manage them through a mixture of json and http. I only deploy my requests and pushs directly to their equipment.

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If this is illigal,

Im not really scared they will come after me for me making something for my environment, im more scared of them if I started selling my software as a 3rdparty alternative to their software and profiting.