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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.
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.
No. Sounds like their own lobbying group did.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The word you are looking for is called: plutocracy
AKA The other golden rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.
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.
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They are plus a ukraining company that I can't remember.
However tractors tend to be long term investment s(20-40 years) and change is slow. This law was focusing on people who bought tractors 10- 15 years ago and need updates and repair work.
John Deere is long term destroying their brand. So sad.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Farmers don't care about hacking directly, but anyone that wants to get in the third party repair business would have to by definition. Farmers would certainly like a less extortionate repair option.
So why is the market failing to produce such an option?
Oligopolies don't have to directly collude to force consumers down this road. They simply copy each other's ideas. And if there's no choice that doesn't have this problem, consumers are still going to need to pick something.
Just look at ISPs for another example of the market not getting what it wants.
It prevents an advantage in gaining market share, but reduces a major revenue stream. It is to the advantage of an individual manufacturer to go open-source, but it is harmful to the industry's profit margins.
The market failure is that the tractor industry is better able to collude than the farmers.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Really expensive overdesigned cars are extremely hard and expensive to repair.
I drive an old Ford Ranger that was only $15000 brand new. It doesn't have any of the options to fail. Crank windows, no factory A.C., and the small 4 cylinder engine. It's been cheap and easy to maintain and currently has about 198,000 miles on the odometer.
maybe they should port tomato to a tractor.
Nullius in verba
It's not like buying something like oil. It's capital investment and it affect the stuff you've already bought.
This is Deere turning an occasional choice about which farmers do have choice into regular payments for which they won't have choice.
This all reminds me of something Gandhi once said. A reporter asked him what he thought of Western Civilization, and he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Capitalism only works because of competition, but companies do everything they can to avoid actually competing, for example making it hard to compare their products to other vendors (boy to vendors hate being in "commodity" businesses), or in this case by trying to make it difficult for customers to choose competitors for some transactions.
And if it's legal to evade competiing, why not? The fact that this undermines the justification for capitalism isn't your problem. This is a situation where you need regulation to ensure a free market can operate the way its' suppose to.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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)?
Um liberal california gov screwed over its people, how is that anything new? The only people that gov listens to is people in the major cities.
Capitalism only works because of competition, but companies do everything they can to avoid actually competing ...
Good observation. I like to say that there is absolutely one thing that you can always count on a corporate entity to do: protect an established revenue stream.
A corporation does not have morals or loyalty even though many of them do their best to create the illusion. They will lie about science, bribe governments, destroy competitors if they can get away with it and often, if they have the short-term mindset and think they can get away with it, wring out their customer base like a dirty washrag. That last seems to be what is happening here.
Next question.
Obviously, that's stupid. The barriers-to-entry are too high in a market this mature. But then, you knew that.
There is *nothing* un-capitalist about government regulation, so long as it is the right kind of regulation. Legislation that mandates that these software solutions be open and available for third-party modification is exactly the right kind of regulation that help keeps a market competitive.
Is that so, Ivan?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That remains to be seen. Musk has been more successful than, say, Fisker, but itâ(TM)s still more likely to join the ranks of Delorean, Packard, Duesenberg, and Steudebaker than it is to become another Mercedes, Ford, or Toyota.
Too bad we canâ(TM)t get a tractor from Lamborghini anymore.
You're thinking of Belarus, which is a big seller in the Central Valley.
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.
Starting a tractor company is one thing. What about a tractor controller company, though?
As long as you own the tractor, not lease it (which opens up many cans of worms with regard to reverse engineering and modifying or even running software or firmware), you should be able to write your own software to control the tractor and attached devices.
DMCA and copyright in general protects the copyrighted code, not the actual processes carried out by the code, and reverse engineering to find the information required to control hardware and communicate with attached devices should be found to be fair use (despite Oracle v Google).
This could actually work, at least for a smaller player to drive growth in market. A smaller player can't maintain the dealer network to pull this off, because it depends on sufficient dealers and service centers to credibly supply the necessary "support" required. And support is required.
But a smaller player simply can't do that. Instead you provide easily accessible diagnostic information, and 1-2 service warehouses able to ship parts overnight with sufficient information for the farmer themselves, independent mechanism with a number of highly mobile factory mechanics (for a fee) when necessary. This open approach would traditionally been seen as an issue by farmers in terms of support. Farmers were used to the local tractor dealer providing the wrap around support required. But in the modern connected era this is making less sense, and a much more open and flexible while still fast form of support is becoming more acceptable, as the big brands try and maintain the dealer network service profitability.
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?
If governments did not have the power to dole out favors (crony... capitalism), competition would be possible.
The problem is always the government.
Da!
How about a company that just makes replacement open standard computer modules.
That way the farmers just remove the closed John Deer one and replace it with an other module?
Has everyone gotten afraid of the soldering iron?
Back in the 8 bit days people would just stack chips, cut connections and bypass circuits to get there computer to work the way they wanted.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Laying the responsibility at the feet of government is misguided. If you have enough money, you can dominate a market and squash or acquire the competition. Classically, this is what Microsoft did in a number of markets.
There is simply no point in letting people own their own family farms..
Citizen komrade. The Politburo approves your thinking but we have suspicions regarding your levels of activism. You will therefore be taken to the State educational and rehabilitation facility in Kbuxluiztik until such time The People determine you are not a threat.
The following is probably wasted on you but here it is anyway:
Yes there is absolutely a good reason for family farms. They produce vastly better product. Go to any Farmers market in any of thousands of cities that take place weekly surrounded by large-scale grocery stores that are selling the factory-farmed products (produce, meats, jams). Every week they are packed. Many times if you get there later than 9AM you will find all the eggs have been sold.
Why is that? The head of lettuce farmed locally (organically farmed or not) tasted better and is better nutrition as opposed to the one trucked in from a factory farm 2000 miles away. The factory farms and big agribusiness are extremely efficient at selling cheap calories. For good nutrition and better living not so much.
"Corporate farming is the only logical method of farming anymore. There is simply no point in letting people own their own family farms. We constantly over produce food and there are many reasons for it... a huge reason is that we need to make agriculture profitable. It's time to quit that... we don't need this scale of production."
My father was the youngest of 14 children. 2 Sisters and 11 Brothers. They all grew up on a farm and learned hard work. Being raised to respect the hard work that goes into eating food, as well as learning about where our food comes from at an early age made me appreciate my food.
Where I live there are a ton of farmers, who still use the barter system. Hey you have a bunch of corn and I have a bunch of hay, lets make a trade.
This creates community, self sufficiency from government and a lesson in hard work.
Getting rid of family farms is quite silly. Unless you want all you food to come from farms with all the extra chemicals and fun that goes into maintaining a mono-crop fields
I would bet you could not tell a taste difference for most products that you bought at the supermarket compared with the same product bought at a farmer's market. There are some exceptions (such as tomatoes, which don't travel well). But, for the most part, the difference in taste has to do with your perceptions of the buying experience. In many cases it is likely the exact same product - what do you think farmers do with the produce that they don't sell at a farmer's market? (Hint: they turn around and sell it to the grocery store.)
Nutritionally there are also few differences. A head of lettuce is a head of lettuce and buying it under a tent while someone strums on a guitar and you sip your organic, cold-pressed hazelnut almond-milk half caff latte doesn't change the chemical make-up of lettuce.
In terms of location, I like buying things from my neighbors and hope they buy things from me, too; but just the fact that they are local doesn't mean they behave any more ethically than a farm that's 2,000 miles from here.
In sum, farmer's markets are a fad and I have nothing against people who enjoy buying food there. But it does often come across as just another level of food smug-ness and doesn't really solve any long-term food problems most people in the United States (let alone the world) experience.
Tesla's best selling month (23,175 in August 2018) was only slightly better than Mercedes' worst month in the past four years (22,955 in July 2018). So far in 2018, Mercedes has sold ~220,000 cars in the US, compared with ~85,000. And Tesla hasn't outsold Mercedes in a single month.
Tesla has its production numbers going in the right direction, but it's not yet clear that they can sustain that level of production, nor that they can survive with the amount of debt the are carrying.
False premise.
You're comparing a long-established traditional car manufacturer's sales numbers against another company that's still building out their manufacturing line. There was a time that FB had only a fraction of the traffic that myspace did too.
While we're using BS numbers, can we compare the sales growth rate of Tesla over the last 12 months with...basically any car manufacturer? Nonsense statistics are nonsense.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
But this whole debate is literally to NOT require dealer service.
Saying it's not viable for another player to enter the market because they don't have the service centers that the farmers don't want to use in the first place makes no sense.
You realize that farmers tend to be pretty handy folks and there are PLENTY of mechanics which can work in diesel and hydraulics. What they can't do is get into the computer that controls everything.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Hmm... to be honest, Iâ€(TM)ve been a smoker most of my life and after quitting smoking, I donâ€(TM)t really buy into the â€oeit tastes better thingâ€. It tastes more, but I generally could always use spices and other taste ingredients to make things taste better.
I also have little or no respect for large scale waste over â€oeit tastes betterâ€. Single unified mass-economy production, inventory and logistics systems will always allow much better management of organic crops. Add robotic vertical indoor farming to the equation and almost all crops could be 100% organic and far cleaner than what youâ€(TM)re advocating.
Family farms are nothing more than a waste of resources, time and money. Unless you think that a loving caring family hugging their plants makes them taste better, itâ€(TM)s typically just a bad idea. The reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic crops is because we canâ€(TM)t manage them properly. The reason we canâ€(TM)t is because we have too many moms and pops who arenâ€(TM)t part of a unified system.
You canâ€(TM)t possibly advocate both organic and family farming with a straight face. Family farms are exactly the reason we donâ€(TM)t have more organic. We have to use all kinds of nasty magic to make the economics of family farms work. Theyâ€(TM)re just too wasteful.
But if throwing away megatons of food while screwing up the whole planet just so you can have tastier celery thatâ€(TM)s been hugged a bunch makes you feel better... we can go all huggy happy family farmer friendly. On the other hand, if you want skillfully produced, mass scale organic crops that are stored, managed and distributed in a fashion that reduced carbon foot prints by numbers so big even Trump canâ€(TM)t describe them (with words like big and huge and stuff)... the you need to reduce humans involved by several orders of magnitude. You have to greatly reduce companies involved. You have to unify planning, management, logistics, distribution, etc... and you have to treat crops as wholistic ecosystems. I give a shit less about free market economics... Iâ€(TM)m far more concerned with efficiency and long term sustainability.
Medicine, education, transportation, food, and housing... these are all things which should be managed and provided by the governments of any first world country.
Moving the goalposts. You stated that Tesla is already outselling Mercedes Benz. The data clearly indicates otherwise.
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.
This looks to be a wonderful example of "won the battle, lost the war".
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for