Last April, Ars reported the curious incident of an Internet-of-Things garage door opener creator who responded to negative reviews and complaints from one customer by shutting down the customer’s account—and in the process, rendering the product unusable. Now, Garadget founder Denis Grisak claims to have reformed his ways, saying he’s opening up the firmware of his company’s eponymous device to allow customers to connect it to the home automation software of their choice, rather than having to rely on Garadget’s own cloud-based service.

Garadget, originally an Indiegogo crowdfunded effort, used an Internet-connected device controller from Particle (the Wi-Fi connected Proton) to provide remote control of garage doors through a smart phone application. The device works with existing garage door openers, essentially functioning as an Internet-connected “button”—allowing owners to remotely open or close their garage doors at a distance via a cloud service. Largely a one-person operation, Garadget has sold about 5,000 devices, Grisak told Ars this week. About 3,000 of those are still active.

But some customers had difficulty getting the mobile application configured, and one took his complaints to Garadget’s community message board and then to Amazon—leaving a scathing one-star review of the product. Grisak (who was handling technical support himself) responded to what he perceived as abuse from the customer by revoking the customer’s key to the cloud service—essentially “bricking” the device by blocking its communications.

The ensuing Internet shaming of Grisak went viral. Having ridden out the storm, Grisak reached out to Ars yesterday to announce that the episode had led to something of an awakening. In a Twitter direct message, Grisak (who later separately confirmed his statement by email) said:

Hi Sean, Your article published last year about Garadget's mishandling of unsatisfied customer who had difficulties installing the product reaffirmed consumers' concerns about the true ownership of IoT devices. With the recent firmware release we are addressing these concerns by enabling our open source controller to directly integrate with the local home automation systems. Thank you.

Garadget had previously provided integration with a number of different devices and home automation interfaces, including Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s HomeKit, and Samsung’s SmartThings. The latest firmware adds support for the open MQTT protocol to the device, allowing Garadget owners to use other applications, including the Creative Commons licensed Home Assistant, to remotely control the device without using the cloud-based communications channel.

Grisak's move is something the Particle platform has supported for a while in its toolset—MQTT has been supported on Particle Photon (and other devices) since at least 2014. But there hasn't been wide adoption for consumer applications. MQTT still requires a broker "server" to manage messages, but it can be run on something as inexpensive as a Raspberry Pi. And as MQTT and other options become more accessible, more IoT device makers will hopefully opt to support the open standard—that is, unless they're using proprietary cloud APIs to lock customers into obsolescence.