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Did John Deere Just Swindle California's Farmers Out of Their Right to Repair? (wired.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a new Wired opinion piece by Kyle Wiens and Elizabeth Chamberlain from iFixit:
A big California farmers' lobbying group just blithely signed away farmers' right to access or modify the source code of any farm equipment software. As an organization representing 2.5 million California agriculture jobs, the California Farm Bureau gave up the right to purchase repair parts without going through a dealer. Farmers can't change engine settings, can't retrofit old equipment with new features, and can't modify their tractors to meet new environmental standards on their own. Worse, the lobbyists are calling it a victory.... John Deere and friends had already made every single "concession" earlier this year...
Just after the California bill was introduced, the farm equipment manufacturers started circulating a flyer titled "Manufacturers and Dealers Support Commonsense Repair Solutions." In that document, they promised to provide manuals, guides, and other information by model year 2021. But the flyer insisted upon a distinction between a right to repair a vehicle and a right to modify software, a distinction that gets murky when software controls all of a tractor's operations. As Jason Koebler of Motherboard reported, that flyer is strikingly similar -- in some cases, identical word-for-word -- to the agreement the Farm Bureau just brokered...
Instead of presenting a unified right-to-repair front, this milquetoast agreement muddies the conversation. More worryingly, it could cement a cultural precedent for electronics manufacturers who want to block third-party repair technicians from accessing a device's software.
Just after the California bill was introduced, the farm equipment manufacturers started circulating a flyer titled "Manufacturers and Dealers Support Commonsense Repair Solutions." In that document, they promised to provide manuals, guides, and other information by model year 2021. But the flyer insisted upon a distinction between a right to repair a vehicle and a right to modify software, a distinction that gets murky when software controls all of a tractor's operations. As Jason Koebler of Motherboard reported, that flyer is strikingly similar -- in some cases, identical word-for-word -- to the agreement the Farm Bureau just brokered...
Instead of presenting a unified right-to-repair front, this milquetoast agreement muddies the conversation. More worryingly, it could cement a cultural precedent for electronics manufacturers who want to block third-party repair technicians from accessing a device's software.
Can't they just not buy Deer anymore and start buying Case or International?
Don't buy John Deere. If I were one of their competitors, I'd be jumping all over this to steal their customers.
A big California farmers' lobbying group just blithely signed away farmers' right to access or modify the source code of any farm equipment software.
No swindle at all. Straight out agreement by the farmers' lobbying group.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Like anyone on Slashdot gives a shit about California farmers. Haters on Slashdot only want to complain about farmers: using water, not treating farm animals like pets, not voting for the latest ultra-progressive fetish grievance rights, not setting aside half their land for some worthless endangered rat habitat. Now concern trolling about tractor repairs.
In a free market, any manufacturer who has open source hardware/software has a gigantic advantage against all others, because that's what the market wants. Therefore such a company should be more successful. So why is the market failing to produce such an option? Legislating it by force may not make it so if we don't address the underlying cause in the first place.
The same could be said for most newer cars or electronics.
Repairs that you used to be able to do now have to be done via a dealer or authorized technician.
Not as bad as tractors. But I would make the argument newer cars are more difficult to work on:
-Engine bay is packed.
-Cant access everything without a lift.
-Software diagnostics
-Proprietary bullshit tools
So my advice to those who work in design and manufacturing... Design your shit to be repaired.
The real question is when farmers are going to put their money where their mouth is and build an open source solution they can get certified by the EPA or whoever handles farm vehicle emissions (since that is the sticking point for end-user control of vehicular modification technology) and produce a bespoke system that can handle those operations on any tractor they need it on.
If they can do that, John Deere will finally either back down or go away, like has been needed for 30+ years now.
No. Sounds like their own lobbying group did.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It maybe a controversial way to refer to it, but essentially this is a form a corporate slavery.
what told you what the market wants? thats like saying data wants to be free.
to capitulate. Did they buy off a bunch of them? Sounds like it. I can't imagine why else a lobbying group for farmers would do the exact opposite of what their constituents want.
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It never ceases to amaze me at how people often times create and support the very institutions that wind up oppressing them, while they develop Stockholm syndrome and refuse to push off the oppression they must suffer out of fear that something worse could happen.
If you are willing to make multiple deals with a lot of devils, maybe you should not complain so much and wonder at which point you caused this problem for yourself.
What's that? Everyone else is doing it? You don't have a choice? Yes, neither did every other person that risked everything to change the world huh?
The change in the world starts with you, when they are ready they will stop buying John Deere and stop giving this corrupt institution their money. Rip it to pieces and build a new that one still cares and when that one stops caring you rip it down and build a new one again.
The price is "Eternal Vigilance" and for some reason people think they can solve a problem once and for all, well you just can't.
Sold out by their own lobbyists.
I'd hope there would be some changes in representation in the future.
I'm guessing the majority of farmers in California are large corporations, maybe owned as a subsidiary of some multi-national holding company,
The actual small scale farmers would be best served not buying new .equipment from J.D. There are probably large amounts of older/non computerized equipment available at a lower cost..
A lobbying group not pressuring legislatures to go further in the law is not "signing" anything away. It's still up to the state government. All they're doing is not pushing John Deere.
There's no long-standing agreement. So, farmers, fuck up the leadership you vote for, or drop out of that group, or start another.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Richard Stallman is an example of how to be a farmer with a GPL license for the software of his tractor.
It gives a freedom to modify/distribute the source code of the tractor for different features or to be more resilient against the bad weather.
Strictly about trying to wring a few more dollars out a agriculture because they can. If I was using Deere equipment, I would start buying from somewhere else. A manufacture that respects my independence and ability to work on my own equipment as much as I want.
maybe they should port tomato to a tractor.
Nullius in verba
Your government just fucked your ass like a cheap whore.
California Uber Alles.
When did California become capitalist?
If you don't pay for the feature why would producent allow you to enable it for free? How would it differ from buying Tesla and changing software to enable battery capacity upgrade (for which you would normaly have to pay)?
Next question.
wait till the morons get to hear YOU DON'T OWN YOUR HARLEY OR CAR ...go thank some actors and musicians .....properly will ya
Musk could well do so. But, so far he has fought on the opposite side. So, it seems that Musk is strenuously opposed to the right to repair concept and open software is just laughable.
Out where I live, we're seeing a lot of old family-owned farms closing up because the owners want to retire, and their kids have no interest in trying to keep working the farm. Nobody else wants to buy the land for farming it either. Really, for all the people expressing so much sorrow over the farmer's plight? The reality is that they're not taking the steps needed to remain profitable on their own terms. You talk to many of them, and they get all indignant about the farm land being bought for not only new housing developments, but even conversion into city parks.
Times have changed, and what I see is that there's still a lot of room to make lots of money in farming, IF you do it on a relatively small scale and shoot for higher profit margins offering really fresh, organic produce and/or meats. You ALSO (like all other businesses) have to be good at doing the marketing and distribution. Work deals with area restaurants to exclusively use YOUR products and advertise your farm right on their menu. See if area grocery stores will allocate a small section just to your products and feature them. Unless you're lucky enough to be right off a major road that's used heavily for tourist traffic, you probably won't make it by just putting up a produce stand during the day and trying to sell to passers-by.
By contrast? You could put together some kind of co-op with other farmers, joining forces to work a bigger farm as a group. But these medium-sized, old family farms just don't seem like the best idea, moving forward. Too much expense, both up-front and to work that much land. Too much risk if things don't pan out in a given season. And no point in trying to compete with big, corporate agriculture who cranks out the bulk of the food people eat.
There's still too much of a mentality that "government owes us" something to help sustain farming. Farm subsidies are, by and large, a bad idea and need to go away. It's ridiculous how often a farm is paid NOT to grow a certain crop or compensated when they can't sell what they've got for as much money as they wanted to. America produces plenty of food, and does it more efficiently than ever before. It's probably the case that with more automation/robotics, we'll get to a point where they require very little human labor to do the actual farming. So either you're part of that large scale food production operation, or you're a niche farmer, offering something special at a higher mark-up.
Farmers can do mechanical But Software? Perhaps farmers feel the mechanical options outweigh the software restrictions. Software has different regulations and an area they probably conceded would be a legal swamp in fighting beyond practicality. Should view more broadly how this affects a nations agriculture competitiveness. Affects cost of citizens food and a large export industry. Is CA leading or lagging?
I don't this is an issue that matters to most farmers. I did grow up on a dairy farm with both Deere and International tractors. The bigger row crop tractors are near $350,000 new. I don't think most of the farmers are interested in messing with the internals of software. Sure they want to replace the field serviceable parts. They don't have the expertise in most cases to mess with the software and who would really want to potentially brick a machine that cost that much?
As for the competition Deere has simply done a great job, Case doesn't have the dealer and parts network that Deere has. There are way more Deere dealers in an area by far in most instances. Farming is a weather time sensitive business and it is a big deal being able to get a part in a timely manner. Unless you happen to live near a Case or other dealer, many of those dealers have shut there doors since the 90's. In the 4 county area of Iowa I am from I think there are 4 Deere dealers and 1 Case dealer.
I work in IT now and we are not allowed to view the table structure of our healthcare database, the software company considers that proprietary information, I think Deere could argue the same thing.
In 2012, 75% of the 2 million farms in the US produced a paltry three percent of total revenue. In fact, their average annual income was less than $40k per farm, and most of that was from "non-farm" income, like subsidies, retirement income, etc.
John Deere couldn't care less about those farmers -- the money obviously lies elsewhere. Their real target for this action was the three percent of farms (classed "large" or "very large" by the US Dept of Agriculture) that accounted for a whopping 52 percent of all production and 66.4% of agricultural revenue in the US.
So -- John Deere isn't going to worry about a bunch of hayseeds hacking their tractors, not even 2.5 million of them -- they are not a significant revenue source now, and based on concentration trends in the US agriculture market, they are going to disappear entirely. With this action John Deere is sending a message to those three percent of farms that account for two-thirds of all farm revenue: John Deere will not tolerate competition from their own customers when it comes to fixing broke tractors.
Marx was right about one thing -- owning the means of production (he called it "tools"; we call it hardware, now) is one of the two keys to capitalist success, and in a largely mechanized and automated industry like agriculture, that means owning the firmware, and through it, the hardware. Ironically, killing competition is the other key, and John Deere has apparently grokked both keys rightly.
Note: this is a slightly updated version of a post I made a year and a half ago on a slashdot story about John Deer cracking down on farmers using Ukrainian firmware on their tractors to dodge John Deere's $240 + $130/hr fee to have a John Deer engineer "authorize" repairs.