Deere’s position on right to repair is heartbreaking to me. I paid for books (and beer) in college as a truck driver and mechanic for a custom harvest operation. We ran Deere 6602 combines from the 1970s, in the early 2000s. Deere’s tagline was “nothing runs like a Deere” but in my experience it was more like “nothing can be made to run like a Deere”. We spent a lot of time on maintenance but very little on repairs. We trusted those machines and they almost always did what we needed. Deere had good parts support locally but we did all the labor ourselves. For us and the farmers we served it would have been economically impossible to hire a Deere tech to do the work. Alienating these equipment operators is a disgrace for a once great brand.
Here's my analysis of what's going to happen if this goes through.
First, quote from the MOU [1]:
> AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU.
It might play out like this:
1. Deere starts a half hearted parts process. They will provide some parts, there will be year long delays in roll out, it will be annoying to use, documentation will be made incomplete on purpose by leaving out random pages or drawings and there will be no way to get them to fix it.
2. Farmers are now locked into using this service for their existing deere equipment because anything else will bankrupt them. Those machines will remain in service for a good 10-20 years which is an important time frame, because
3. Deere will spin off a subsidiary or buy a competitor which will sell what used to be Deere branded technology, "under license". This "new company" will keep all the anti-repair technology in place. New products will primarily come from this company going forward, and the products will be priced so that actual Deere-branded products are not competitive any more, especially second-hand ones.
4. It is now 2028. The MOU cannot be broken because farmers still need parts for their "old" Deere products. Deere anti right to repair lives on in the artificial competitor, which now retains 90% market ownership. Farmers cannot argue for right to repair any more. They've been sold out. Everything has gone back to normal for at least the next 25 years, as far as Deere is concerned.
Alternatively Deere will lobby to get the EPA or some other bureaucracy to add an Oxford comma somewhere there wasn't one before necessitating expensive major revision to everything you make and you will be bankrupt long before the courts rule that no they didn't really have the authority to make that rule change.
I only hope a very aggressive competitor emerges that disrupts Deere out of existence. Sometimes I wonder why groups such as farmers dont band together to form a collective which can protect them against such predatory companies.
They have - agricultural co-ops are popular and common for exactly those reasons. They haven't moved into ag equipment yet though (at least in a big way), I'm guessing since modern equipment is complicated and advanced enough that it makes sense to have a separate organisation that designs and builders them.
Deere already has plenty of competitors. CNH taken as a whole is approximately the same size if you look at the global market. Farmers are not prisoners of Deere. They can just buy another brand.
It's almost certainly what is going to happen. They're just buying time (a LOT OF time) in order to regroup and come back in force and once again take away our right to repair or own our things, this time in a new, more permanent method, which is now also protected legislatively.
Short term profit at the expense of everything else. At some point there will be a reckoning on all the damage this cult has done to society, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon.
I sometimes wonder if companies should/could be forced to publish a “lifetime cost” of all of their products, much like we do energy ratings for appliances. Something that would show all of the expenses over the lifetime of the products, including estimated maintenance and lifespan before replacement so people have a better idea of the true cost of the purchase.
I am confident the reporting would likely be captured by the manufacturers anyway and there would be a lot of arbitrary inputs into the reports, but something to fight the short term profit taking you describe.
Hard to imagine this working, even in a perfect world. Set aside regulatory capture and corruption and politicking and pretend that everybody does a genuine best-effort attempt to be honest.
It's extremely hard to know ahead of time which products will ultimately be reliable and which will be flaky. Most flaky components weren't designed with that in mind -- there are some exceptions, but maintenance headaches are normally a mistake by the manufacturer. And even setting that aside, a big part of "cheap to maintain" is how many units you ship: part of why it's cheap to maintain a Civic or a Corolla is because they made millions of them, parts are everywhere, and every shop knows how to deal with them. But knowing up front if your product is going to be a hit or a flop is just not generally possible, even though that has a huge impact on maintenance costs.
Even in a world of angels, I don't know that this idea would work in general. Maybe if it was specific to some industries where the costs are easier to estimate?
It’s already the case that you have to do this for certain groups of products in France under the AGEC laws. Take for example this dishwasher: https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/diskad-lave-vaisselle-encastrab... . It has an “indice de répairabilité” of 7.4, generated from a bunch of different factors such as ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts and documentation, and the ability to factory-reset it. The data sheet listing those factors for this model is here: https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/files/pdf/4f/fd/4ffd4fd2/indice-d...
I don't know what, if any, regulations are involved but here in Norway several of the big electrical retailers have started publishing the expected lifetime of products together with statement of how long spares will be available.
For example the Ankarsrum food mixer (successor to the classic Electrolux Assistent) entry at Elkjop.no states that the expected lifetime is 30 years and that spares will be available for 12 years.
I like that a lot. Judging from the criteria (in my extremely limited French) it’s a measure of effort rather than outcome, but honestly effort is all we can really ask for.
No: it’s fairly recent (and in fact only a part of the wider set of AGEC requirements that include labelling for recyclability, recycled status, consumption of rare earths and precious metals, origin of textiles, etc.) And then there’s the EU-wide Digital Product Passport[1] coming in the next few years that’ll up the game again. We’ll see over the coming years what customer perception is like.
Total cost of ownership is a pretty standard estimate in the auto world, but yes, it really needs to be done by a 3rd party, and of course the tractor market is pretty niche in comparison.
Even if they only did this with the maintenance schedule costs, with breakouts for major possible maintenance incidents, in present dollars. That would be extremely useful.
Companies like consumer reports should do this sort of thing.
MBAs had no long-term vision, so in each company they infested, they made poor strategic decisions such as moving manufacturing overseas, which then forced other companies to move their manufacturing overseas.
The countries they chose have zero respect for intellectual property. So now what's left are zombie companies milking their cash cows dry as international competitors arise and take their market share.
>MBAs had no long-term vision, so in each company they infested, they made poor strategic decisions such as moving manufacturing overseas, which then forced other companies to move their manufacturing overseas.
The economic basis for that appeared way before the first MBA got a job.
The goal of any business is to make money, it's why they exist. Moving production overseas saves money. I don't see why this has anything to do with MBAs
The question is whether you want to make money in the short term or in the long term. You can do a lot of things that will increase profits for a few years but kill the company long term.
If I were to make a product, I would hope that I'm making money because it's a quality product people like and want to buy because it's good, and not because I'm delivering the minimum possible value not considered fraud to extract maximum value from the customer.
Erm no, if there is a group of hooligans, than I will still assume that they are up for violence and if there is a bunch of MBAs taking over companies, I will assume that they are there for short term profit.
Well cant botch it that hard, the pals from ivy that are now in government, wont bail you out. So, guess we will never know the good from the bad >> eyescroll <<
People can hate Elon all they want. The guy is extravagant and controversial, and maybe not the best role model for your kids.
But he is right in the sense that a company leader needs to occasionally leave the meeting room and get in the factory floor, get direct exposure to customers and see things firsthand.
We would be already in Mars if we had not stopped doing that.
What's the flip side? VC's? You know, the people who won't even start a company unless there's a way to try to monopolize the position, buy up all supply with seed money, and then extract ALL the possible rent from the market segment? "Long-term" thinking with precisely the same anti-competitive, anti-consumer end result.
> Short term profit at the expense of everything else. At some point there will be a reckoning on all the damage this cult has done to society, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon.
I can't see how, the same people pushing for WTO/NAFTA are those who profited immensely from outsourcing in the 80s-90s are now the same one who likely stand to benefit the most from either supply chain disruptions, and war.
The truth is that JD is just another monopoly ([0] over 50% market share of tractors) that represents the underlying aspects of crony capitalism writ large. This is just another example how the mantra that 'tech should be in everything' needs to die, and how pervasive these horrible practices can become for the small sector of humans (less than 1% of the Human population feeds the other 99%) who grow the food everyone eats.
MBAs making supply chains inherently fragile and over who valued BS things like JIT are just reflecting what is most rewarded in the corpo culture: quick profits are the way to get fat bonuses and stock options in order to bail out when even the slightest hint of head-winds occur. This is just a symptom, not the cause and a reason why US manufacturing will likely take some time before it can get off it's addiction to the garbage made in China.
I dunno I'm currently trying to boycott Chinese made goods, regardless the cost. I'm in the position to be able to do that but so are many others.
It's like they're targeting the lowest common denominator.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy right? If the manufacturing was internal to the US say, theres more jobs hence better economy hence people are able too afford those locally prepared goods.
That probably requires a united front against outsourcing though. It's almost as if globalism breeds poverty, and is just a way for megacorps to milk us of our cash. Totally removed from any kind of social responsibility.
They sure love to change their logos to a rainbow and call that social responsibility though. Like Nike shipping you a keychain of all the micro plastics produced during the manufacturing of those shoes you just bought as if making you deal with their waste is environmental responsibility.
>It's almost as if globalism breeds poverty, and is just a way for megacorps to milk us of our cash.
Or it is arbitraging labor prices across different markets and lifting up others. Or it is also arbitraging environmental regulations and taking advantage of more corrupt/inept societies. Or it is also arbitraging better efficiencies in a more appropriately regulated economy, rather than an under or over regulated economy.
I think the "wherever possible" is implied. Where does this kind of cheap-shot snark end? Shall we next post the We Should Improve Society Somewhat comic?
...besides, maybe they're posting from one of those Raspberry Pi Model Bs that were fabbed in the UK.
> maybe they're posting from one of those Raspberry Pi Model Bs that were fabbed in the UK.
That is connected to a router made in China. And the keyboard and display, where were they made? My point is that it is pretty much unachievable and your "wherever possible" is just a get out of jail free card. Also it isn't a particularly laudable aim if we scale it up to the whole of society. We need the various countries in the world to be interdependent, we need China to need to sell to us.
I just bought an oven made in Turkey. I bought various 4WD mods manufactured in Australia. Keyboard was made by me using parts from USA and Germany. Another keyboard made in Taiwan.
China (aka East Taiwan) makes cheap shit. If you have money you can afford the better manufactured stuff from non tofu-dreg countries.
We need to divulge from China a much as possible and many companies are. It is not ethical to do business with a country that has concentration camps. Hopefully one day the ROC will reclaim power over China and clean all that up.
Obviously paying the premium for Snap-On over harbor freight is worth it, for some people. Harbor Freight still makes the most sense for a huge portion of the market, reducing the market for US made tools.
Whatever the result, it will be visible in what succeeds in the market over the long term.
First you have the product people. They make the product that people like and build a strong company off of a good product.
After the product people you have the marketing people come in. They don’t really know how to evolve the product, but they know how to sell it and generally they know not to mess with a good product and the company makes a lot of money and grow to the logical maximum of whatever product or services they offer.
Eventually the marketing people reach the limit and then the finance people come in. And this is when a company fully gets gutted. To the bean counters every thing is a bean. They look at the good successful product and think, “how can we make this cost less to make.” So they cut every corner they can to make numbers go up on a spreadsheet. At first this is okay, because it is just a few changes that aren’t that big of a deal, but 30 change later and customers notice and are irate and swear off the company forever.
Not satisfied they will usually cut internal costs too and all of the good employee will leave.
The company then sometimes brings back in a product person and rebounds or sells off to private equity.
I think Louis Rossmann said they'd worked on that bill for over 7 years, desperately trying to keep it from being compromised into oblivion. Then, on the eve of passage, the legislature amended away everything that mattered in it by adding an exception big enough to drive a... John Deere tractor through, and the governor (who was part of the process) quickly signed it into law. https://youtu.be/k9kXnm9uW5k . Keywords from the video: "Nicholas Cage Lord of War Supply Chain", "malicious compliance".
Indeed. The game is rigged. The US became an oligarchy. Lobbyists get their way at the expense of everyone.
I don't see much recourse, other than substantial and continued boycotts for all companies pushing this garbage.
I am not buying mobile phones anymore, since my last one broke due to overheating, and in spite of the warranty terms not forbidding custom ROMs they did not honor it.
When I worked on a vegetable farm in Vermont one summer, it was instantly apparent that the farmer spent a lot of time (at least 25%?) maintaining and fixing tractors. It’s a shame that rampant financialization and rent seeking has yet again made farmers’ lives more difficult.
What's interesting is this appears to be driven by Right to Repair legislation that's been making it's way through various states. There's an explicit ask that AFBF not support any Right to Repair legislation:
"AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU."
> that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU
That seems like a bit of a loophole for FB organizations - namely, they can support legislation that imposes obligations that are in the MOU, but must not support legislation the reaches beyond that.
Too little too late. They have burned good faith, and this move stinks of more manipulation. As others suggested, this probably aims to thwart legislative action, and they will make everything available at an inaccessibly exorbitant price point and inexcusable lead times.
Seriously, Deere has been a market leader in alienating customers for years. There is no possibility that this is being done for the benefit of their customers. Mark my works, this move will ultimately be revealed as self-serving. Meanwhile, it should be met with nothing but skepticism by customers.
In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU.
I agree but the threat here is that if any one state successfully passes RTR regulation, they'll punish all the other states in response. Basically trying to put regulators and lobbying orgs into a "cold war" against them.
This of course means that the only way to fix this without harming consumers is federal laws which is shitty because grassroots legal progress is far more preferable.
This is the smart money take. They ran an EV calculation on the cost of half heartedly allowing self repair (but in a sneaky way in which surely favors them) with a reduced probability of legislation vs the probability of legislation being imposed on them and figured they can milk more money out of this scenario.
They will surely allow DIY in the most convoluted, inaccessible way humanly possible and try to keep this scenario as close as possible to the tractors being unrepairable.
roughly, imagine a decision tree where each end node has a set of probabilities and a utility points values per outcome probability. You multiply out the probability of each outcome with it's point value and pick the decision path which maximizes your probability weighted outcome. In most cases utility points equals how much money you make or lose but it doesn't have to be that.
So if one path has a 10% chance of -100000 points (ie something terrible happens) and a 90% chance of get 1000 points (something very good happens) this path has an expected value of (.1 * -100000) + (.9 * 1000) = -9100
whereas some other branch has a 100% chance of an outcome of 10 points. You take the branch where you get the guaranteed 10 points because even though the best case is on the other branch, the average case on that branch is worse than on the 10 point branch.
And what I'm saying is they decided that their highest average payoff as doing some compromised version of self allowed diy whereas they get a really bad payoff in the case where the diy legislation is written externally and actually forces them to allow reasonable diy
There's a knock-on effect too. I work for a technology-adjacent company, and the biggest push the company has been making for the past 10 years -- right after being woke and going green, of course -- is implementing a whole bunch of "cybersecurity" measures into our product that feels an awful lot like they're cribbing their answers from Deere, to prevent a handful of people from reprogramming the device. The whole thing is excused with, "But but but the customer may make a modification that we didn't endorse, and we could be sued out of existence!" Fine, then go the other way. Ask your Congresspeople to pass a law that says if you "tamper" with the device, all warranties expressed or implied are null and void, and if it breaks, you can't sue. I don't understand what's so hard about that. I really don't.
> pass a law that says if you "tamper" with the device, all warranties expressed or implied are null and void
This is a terrible idea. There is a very good reason "warranty void if removed" stickers are unenforceable in the US due to the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
If I have a software safety check in a giant combine harvester: if person detected <3m in front of harvester, emergency stop.
Farmer finds it annoying so they install a "patch" they found on the Internets that disables it. Now there are two major options legally:
* The law states that it's the company who is responsible for this safety feature, therefore the company tries to lock down the hardware/software as much as possible * The law states that modifications null/void certain parts of the warranty & other bits.
If I have a warranty on a CPU, isn't it void if I overvolt that CPU to the point it dies? Don't you think it should be? Afaik it's accepted that warranties on cars are void if you do something stupid with them.
There are a lot of physical systems that are capable of damaging themselves if they operate in an unconstrained manner - so the limitations are software defined.
Look, for example, at what Stuxnet is capable of doing to industrial centrifuges.
Now, it's somewhat unlikely that user defined software will cause damage comparable to active malware - but mistakes do happen.
(marcus0x62's comment pretty much invalidates what I just said.)
The very good reason is that, as the parent commenter wrote, the Magnuson-Moss Warranty act makes it illegal for manufacturers to deny warranty service because of third-party modifications or repairs, unless they can demonstrate the third-party modification/repair caused a defect in the original product.
So why should something so explicitly... tampering... as, say, REFLASHING an ECM for a diesel engine, NOT exempt the manufacturer from third-party stupidity? This is what I can't wrap my head around. Where's the limit of legal liability? IS there no limit? Are the people milling about my company, excusing every added layer of bureaucracy due to being liable if a customer chips their Dodge Ram, melting the exhaust system onto their garage floor, and burning down their house actually CORRECT?! THIS is the law that is causing us to augment our entire development chain with the ability to sign and encrypt our binaries to prevent this malfeasance?
If the customer rechips their ECU and melts their exhaust into the floor, you can absolutely deny the exhaust repair under warranty. You just have to be able to prove the modification caused the problem in the first place.
edit - and I tend to view encrypted ROMs, etc., as being more about pulling the kind of anti-consumer/anti-repair shenanigans discussed in the original article than any genuine concern about limiting liability. But maybe that’s just my bias peeking through.
They'll use "safety" as an excuse to subvert this, and keep gouging the farmers. It's the same hack that just happened in New York to their now useless "right to repair" law.
Possibly Fendt. Fendt and John Deere have about the same reputation for mechanical durability and technology leadership (in Germany, my dad is a retired farmer). Fendt is owned by Agco, also American, so they might get the MBA disease at some point as well... but so far, the main thing Agco has done with Fendt is investment to improve and expand.
Fendt is considered the cream of the crop around here, at least as far as tractors go, but the dealer network is sparse. I'd run into several Deere dealerships before finally getting to the Fendt dealer.
All brands break. If you don't have easy access to parts, it's harder sell. Farmers don't want machines they can't easily fix and so Deere wins on that front. The CaseIH dealer network is just as strong, so that's the actual competition for Deere in these parts.
Case IH is one that I have seen starting to become more popular and farmers selling their JDs and replacing them with Case tractors. Case has good service and you can purchase most mechanical parts to replace existing broken parts without having to go through a service technician if you don't want to.
Tractor market will soon be geared towards Farming-As-A-Service. John Deere has already bought multiple autonomous tractor companies. The biggest ones at 305 and 250 million are Blue River and Bear Flag,
Also: JV with GUSS automation orchard spraying tech. And Light for some kind of vision AI. There is a ‘startup incubator’ guy sitting in SF and JD is furiously buying everything they can get their hands on. In fact, I know at least two moderately funded startups whose sole aim is to be acquired by JD.
Meanwhile Case IH/CNH is also invested in Raven(that I like a lot actually and can give a good run for JD who hasn’t been lagging behind in the grain/combine automation equip). AGCO/Massey/Fendt is looking at the retrofit sector. Bless their hearts.
It’s time to consolidate just like with the Ag inputs/seeds/fertilizer where I think a few giants control almost all of the market after a flurry of mergers and acquisitions: Dow/DuPont, Sygenta/ChemChina, Bayer/Monsanto. BASF stands alone but they are not big on seeds. Dow/DuPont merged but then spun off Corteva, but it’s still incestous. It’s the Big4 now. Same thing will happen with the tractor and equipment sector with the main players being JD, CNH and AGCO.
It is what it is.
ETA: Let’s not forget how JD almost bought Monsanto before it went before DoJ to stop the sale and Bayer ended up paying 60 something billion for a lemon right before the Roundup trial. JD desperately wanted Climate Fieldview and Monsanto that owned Climate did NOT include it in the sale to Bayer. Fun times.
> "allow farmers to repair their own equipment" - What a terrible state of affairs if this is an exception rather than the norm. :(
Blame your fellow 'I'm just making money' loose ethics type programmer, they could just as easily be making drones used to destroy entire apartment buildings or the privacy-intruding facial recognition with that type reasoning, but instead they choose to deny farmers from making the food that you eat instead.
When I was in my last round of job hunting as a data scientist, a recruiter approached me with an offer to interview for a job in "kill chain analytics" for a defense contractor's drones.
Perhaps but I'd blame the executive team that decided that this was the "right" thing to do more. There's a a difference in the responsibility of the person who took the decision vs. the one who was hired to do a job and did it.
> Should state or federal right-to-repair legislation be enacted, both Deere and the federation have the right to withdraw from the agreement with 15 days’ written notice.
Would be useful to compare the terms of this agreement with draft right-to-repair legislation which has been rejected by Deere and others.
Deere's competitors should go all-in on maintainability and documentation as a countermove. When it starts to eat into their marketshare they'll pay attention, until then they will just drag their heels as much as legally possible.
Unfortunately Case IH, New Holland, Claas and Kubota all have a similar attitude towards their customers, which makes this an industry wide problem, not a John Deere problem. Legislators should ignore the veiled threats and force these companies to open up 'or else'.
Yeah, it's kind of a joke to say that there's no problem with the "free market" in the American version of capitalism when all the big players collude on the same anti-consumer position, because they all win, and their execs take home more options and pay because of it.
No I think that's simply because that's actually what consumers want.
The less a company makes on maintenance and repairs, the more it has to make on the initial sale, which means a higher upfront cost. People generally don't like paying a lot of money upfront, so naturally, companies will make profit in other ways.
Easy to see with smartphones. When manufacturers started to make batteries non user replaceable, did it make consumers flock to manufacturers that still offered user replaceable batteries? The answer is no, consumers have chosen, they don't care, except for a minority too small for manufacturers to need caring. There are alternatives, like the Fairphone, but it is not a mainstream device, and it is expensive for its specs, so few people buy it.
Not only it is our choice, but we are not even honest about it. We are happy to buy hard-to-repair devices, but then, we want to game the system by using regulation.
Don't get me wrong, I am in favor of the right to repair movement. But I also understand that it will go against the will of consumers by raising the prices. It is a bit like safety and the environment. We don't want cars with emission control, because they are more expensive and have more points of failure, but we are forced to buy them anyways, and it is good for all of us in the end. I think the right to repair is good for the environment and for the economy in general, so it is worth regulating.
My dad lives in rural North Dakota. He's not a farmer, but he knows all the farmers in the area and does some work at his neighbor's farm for something to keep him busy in retirement. I sent him the Ars Technica article about this. This is his text back to me
"But they kept the copyright to all data and electronic tools. You have to buy their equipment and many manuals amounting to over 20k for each piece of equipment in most cases. I talked to one of the john deere mechanics, he said he only knows of one farm that has done so because of the price but did so because he also hired a guy that use to work for john deere. I thing the Most important thing farmer's get out of it is the access to the diagnostic codes and JD manuals that can be used to trouble shoot the problem once you have the code. I've seen the software used and it is dynamite. It talks the mechanic through most steps of the trouble shooting. Since everything is computerized, almost need it to understand the electronic issues which of course is all stored on the individual computer components. One for transmission,engine, power train couplings and all other devices. Yet again, it costs approximately 5-7 hundred dollars just for the mechanic to show up at the farm, each time.. so if it doesn't get fixed or no parts til the next day, that's 2 trips which doesn't include any labor... "
Imagine its 1880 and the news of the day is that farmers are allowed to shoe their horses on their own, with horseshoes that they can procure themselves.
Imagine it is 2080 and the news of the day is that farmers will be allowed to buy "BioSerum" that extends the expiration date of their genetically engineered HyperHorse by one month.
Imagine it is 4080: air molecules "dial home" via quantum entanglement every time they enter a farmer's body, eliminating once and for all illicit air-breathing that has gone undetected / untaxed ever since Homo Sapiens took her first breath
> They’re only trying to delay the inevitable regulation.
Yes. That's Deere's explicit goal. The American Farm Bureau Federation had to agree not to support right-to-repair legislation to get that concession from Deere.
Signed on a Sunday. Wonder why. Some legislative deadline approaching?
I'm not a farmer but harvest time can be pretty intense. You might only have a narrow window to get certain crops in where the crops are ready and the weather has been right and your onward destination can accept them physically and contractually. So have all the other farms. And that crop represents your yearly income. So you have all this demand in this time window and you have equipment sitting there cause computer says no. Very frustrating.
When my brother and I were in college, I worked as a farm hand the same summer he was working a computer engineering internship. His hours were capped at 39/wk and he still made more money per week than I did working 80/wk.
I loved farming, but there is not a ton of money in unskilled labor. (Sure, you can do a lot better if you have skills/experience or own the farm...)
They'll provide "tools and manuals". If this includes service software that is good. Also I wonder what kind of detail is there in those service manuals. For the mechanical components I would at least expect drawings of each assembly showing every gear, every seal, every clip with spec. For electronics I would expect at least board view files if not schematics. Do I believe this will happen before it is law to publish it? Not really.
When finally those laws get proposed I fully expect manufacturers to claim "security and IP theft" exceptions and politicians will fold. I still have electronic equipment made in the 80's that had not just schematics in its manual, but pcb layout drawings so you could remake a pcb if it got destroyed... And somehow we didn't have clones of this equipment appear.
While I agree with you that companies should provide sufficient information to enable consumers to repair their products, I think considering the complexity that goes into manufacturing mechanical components and fabricating circuit boards, it would be a long shot for many consumers to repair equipment on their own.
Hobbyists/industrial outfits would be a different story as they would have in-house expertise....
Are they worth to buy for modern/semi-modern cars? I think I owned one for Peugeot 106 2002. There wasn't that much really useful stuff in it No detailed exploded mechanical drawings of all parts, just drawings showing major assemblies and selected parts.
Then I bought some "service manual" cd on ebay and there was everything there. Even estimates how long it "should" take to replace specific parts.
I doubt it, I don't have one for my early 2000s vehicles but for my early 90s vehicles it's a boon. I think they stopped printing and moved to online. Perhaps it was an IP fear that led to them getting less detailed?
But the 1991 Nissan Patrol manual for instance doesn't show how to reflow your injectors. It does however indicate you can use a fish scale to measure the force of the throw for the steering swivel hub so you can decide if you need to add or remove shims from the king pin bearings. Rebuilding this hub and even the diff is described.
> Should state or federal right-to-repair legislation be enacted, both Deere and the federation have the right to withdraw from the agreement with 15 days’ written notice.
Is this supposed to be a threat? Should legislation be enacted, they would be forced to comply with it. At that point any "voluntary" agreement seems pointless.
Are they trying to coerce individual states into not passing right to repair under the assumption that should one state pass a right to repair law, they would retaliate by discontinuing access to spare parts and related materials in other states?
So, it's this the typical corporate playbook tactic of offering a little concession to sap the momentum behind some positive legislation, after they've realized they can't kill it outright through regular lobbying?
I bet in 5-10 years they'll be back to doing everything they can to make repair impractical.
I cant read TFA but i think if John Deere wants to maintain control over the way machines are repaired they should simply stop selling them as retail and move to a "machine as a service" model.
Where they create a network of rental hubs.
I think a lot of farming machinery has moved this way already where you dont pay to own a machine that you may only need a limited number of days/year.
Then they’re going to advertise rental prices for off-season, when nobody actually needs the machines. During the harvest week The Market will demand that rent quadruples. And of course you better pay a reservation in year’s advance, to avoid being told, “I’m sorry sir, we’re out of capacity today, all machines nearby are busy. We can maybe get you one from across the continent for 10 times the price, be ready here in a week.”
I think this is how it works already with harvesters, where the demand is only really during a month of the year.
I don't know the details how it works, but I am assuming there is a way they can work it out where everyone is reasonably happy. Because it is in the interest of the rental service to be predictable.
And there is a huge benefit for the farmer to not have to own and store something that is probably the most expensive machine they have. And also not have to worry about it breaking down at the most critical moment.
Deere has been fighting farmers on this for decades and I would be surprised if they gave up now. They want to avoid laws being passed that forces them into worse terms. If they make the decision themselves they can dictate the terms of the “right to repair.”
I frankly don’t trust the product of a company who has been actively trying to screw over their customers for the past 20 years.
My guess is they know that there are enough parts now that are proprietary and difficult to clone that they are going to have to go the the Deere dealer anyway. Like modern cars those things are loaded with computers and sensors. You have the right to repair it, but that doesn’t mean you have any hope to.
It should be illegal to bundle hardware with closed-source copyrighted software.
If you sell hardware you can bundle it with open-source software that people are free to modify.
Or you can sell it without software and other vendors can supply closed-source software that can't be modified, but you can't have exclusive agreements with those vendors or prefer one over another.
I have to admit, I'd love to be able to modify the software in my microwave to disable the incessant reminder beep. But I'm not sure I agree in general that it companies shouldn't be able to copyright their own software, or put measures in place that make it impractical or impossible for me to modify it. Presumably I'm aware of that when I buy it, and I have options. But I think that's different from being able to repair it.
I buy a widget without software, install a closed source option that is available for the widget, and later want to sell it. Do I have to remove the software?
Deere's forgotten the point of their business: to provide farmers with what they need to do their jobs.
When you make the company about maximizing profit, you interfere with the purpose of your business. You now get in the way of your customers getting what they need and want. This has been proven by Deere, getting in the way of farmers fixing their equipment.
Deere could have instead opened their business more to repair, maximizing trust and reliability with consumers. Truly maximizing their gain in the market. Instead of making themselves the most desirable business in the market, they tried to trap people into inefficient overly-expensive time-wasting processes for the short-term gain of some shareholders and some greedy shallow executives.
What even are the alternatives for farmers, particularly in the US where I presume Deere reigns supreme. Kubota, Kverneland? Or is it effectively a racket where every agricultural equipment manufacturer behaves the same.
This is not a right-to-repair package. This is loose permission to barely repair anything at all.
> In the agreement, the AFBF says it will encourage “state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize” these commitments and “refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state ‘Right to Repair’ legislation.[^1]
Maybe the solution is to add anti-right to repair as a major indicative element to the monopoly legislations (ie if indicated it reduces the hurdle of the other elements that must be proven dramatically). Forcing repair lock in should be indicative of monopoly behavior.
Something needs to change where the perceived "cost" of building out repair lock in revenue is much higher than it currently is.
Why is it illegal infringement if one modifies embedded software locally (as opposed to selling it). Is that not the equivalent of writing a note within a book? “assure that the intellectual property of Manufacturer, including copyrighted software, is fully protected from illegal infringement through the modification of Embedded Software; …”
You can have right of repair in 1 day the free market way - no copyright protection, patents or damages awarded for chip firmware or repair manuals.
This is the great fraud of our time - Right to Repair is portrayed as government intervention in the free market and excersise in socialism
When actually it is the Government that grants John Deer artifical monopoly on bits and bites and doesn't just fine, but imprisons anyone who doesnt agree.
Copyright, itself a fraudulent name, is a privilidge, awarded to advance sciences and arts. Where it does not advance anything, it should not apply.
I agree that copyright sucks, but I don't see, in copyright-free world, what would prevent a hardware manufacturer from making the firmware impossible to modify for example by using hardcoded signature verification.
If the tractor is my property, I don't understand what gives John Derr the right to prevent me from modifying it how I see fit.
Imagine they did this with a physical object, broke into your house and stopped you from opening the engine - that would be tresspass and a dozen other crimes. Why is it legal just because it's digital?
This is why people are calling it Neo-feudalism or digital feudalism, the relationship is lile between me the serf and john deer the medieval Lord
Also I am not against copyright, but it was created for books 200 years ago, not control software that determines if you go bancrupt, or live or die.
> I don't understand what gives John Derr the right to prevent me from modifying it
OP described exactly what prevents you from modifying hardware you own how you see fit:
> hardware manufacturer from making the firmware impossible to modify for example by using hardcoded signature verification.
If you don't understand this entirely technical mechanism, then you should read into it to find out what we're really up against. Basically, the chip running the software is set up to only run software that has been cryptographically signed by the manufacturer. If you modify the software, the chip refuses to run it.
If you painstakingly opened the chip and managed to change a few of the right bits, you might be able to convince that one chip to run different software. But you wouldn't get any information that would help you run software on other, unmodified, chips - the private signing key stays with the manufacturer, the chips themselves only contain the public verification key. Of course manufacturers employ techniques to prevent such physical attacks, so you wouldn't have an easy time of it either.
The straightforward path to overcome would be to completely swap out the chip for another without such a restriction, and completely rewrite the software, but then you're up against the churn of the market - the model (and hardware revision) you've specifically designed a replacement for will be a tiny fraction of the market.
I think we are sort of in agreement, that if John Deer is allowed to encrypt firmware such that the user cannot access it, then we are stuck.
I was trying to point out that securing the chip against the owner of the tractor should not be legal - in the same way that taking away a wheel from your tractor would not be allowed -it now your property
We're definitely in agreement for how the world ought to work. My larger point is that this isn't merely a problem created by the government through the legal system - for which statements of "ought" would have straightforward implications of getting rid of the oppressive laws. Rather it seems to be a problem due to informational complexity, and will take positive government action to reign companies in, similar to the privacy issue.
On the technical side, the difficult bit is coming up with ways that discern the owner of a computer from a mere possessor of a computer. There are many legitimate cases for protecting against a mere possessor (evil maid, datacenter, theft prevention), to the point that blanket outlawing processors with built in code signing isn't going to happen. The only way I've thought of is through some sort of time delay where if you put the processor in a debug mode and let it sit there for a period of time (say a week), you'd then be treated as the owner and could reflash signing keys etc.
The simple legislative approach would be to make it so that a manufacturer has to create an automated process of signing code hashes supplied by legitimate owners, that would allow the code to run on the owner's hardware. But this would just be constraining the centralized power that manufacturers have and hoping the law would be strong enough to enforce it (and keep enforcing it), rather than reforming the capability to begin with.
>On the technical side, the difficult bit is coming up with ways that discern the owner of a computer from a mere possessor of a computer. There are many legitimate cases for protecting against a mere possessor (evil maid, datacenter, theft prevention), to the point that blanket outlawing processors with built in code signing isn't going to happen.
That idea is so easy to abuse (e.g. are you sure you become the owner when you buy a computer?) that IMO there really should be no distinction between owner and possessor. If you have physical access to the device you should be able to do whatever you want with it. Physical security is easy for people to understand, unlike public-key cryptography. I'd much rather have maids steal my encrypted bits due to my carelessness if it means I have full control over my hardware.
The ownership vs possesion is definately tricky, as the history of crypto is littered with lost or stolen keys, etc.
I'd like to see the keys to the kingdom being unique for each machine and being handed over to the owner when the purchase is made.
As for positive government action- I think government plays 'neutral' action when it sets the rules of the game, and current rules of the game are, you could be consodered owner of a vehicle even though you don't have keys to the software.
Those rules are wrong and need changing - because we have never explicitly set the rules for what does it mean to own an object with firmware.
I am trying to frame it in such a way, as to make it clear that we arent asking manufacturers for concession, we are correcting illigitimate market behaviour, sort of like selling snake oil.
On the other, Farmers are a terrible group to start with. They've actively resisted it in the past and are very unlikely to have or be willing to gain the skills needed and they are ultimately running businesses and should behave accordingly.
Seeing "to allow" and "their own" being used in that way in the title is a disturbingly dystopian sign of the times. I don't think things like this should ever need to be explicitly allowed, in much the same way as one does not need permission for many other things which are naturally assumed to be so.
For contrast:
"Government to allow people to use their own brains."
While I philosophically agree, I struggle to reconcile it with some other practicalities. I (mostly) design and build radio systems, and as the manufacturer it is our job to ensure that it is a well behaved radio system - transmits in the frequency bands it's meant to, at the power it's meant to, without leaking and interfering with other things. For a consumer product, where much of the radio implementation is in some form of software, how do I ensure that the system continues to meet the rules?
You could argue that any changes to the software are then the fault of the user, which is a reasonable point of view. But what if someone comes up with a mod that makes your wifi better by breaking transmit power rules (at the expense of others). Lots of people might use it, and then there are resulting widespread interference problems. Difficult to identify culprits, possibly too many to prosecute etc.
But what if someone comes up with a mod that makes your wifi better by breaking transmit power rules (at the expense of others). Lots of people might use it, and then there are resulting widespread interference problems.
This already exists in multiple forms. It's incredibly easy to import adapters and antennas that give you an order of magnitude more power than you're legally allowed to use. I used one of those setups in high school to run uTorrent over the AP of the McDonald's half a mile away.
Regular folks don't care enough to break the rules.
It wasn't a big problem in the days before manufacturers had the technical capability to prevent tinkering so why would you expect it to be a big problem now?
Because much more is in software than it used to be.
In the past, most of the key aspects of the radio were pretty fixed in the hardware. Whereas now, more and more of the radio is in software (and/or FPGA), or at least configurable from software. Tinkering in that case requires a "per person" level of skill. Whereas tinkering with software requires one person to be able to tinker, and then lots of people can use the result.
You basically already have a Constitution-esque "right to root", as changing the software on hardware you own is not illegal. What we're actually dealing with is technical measures that can effectively prevent us from doing so. There are a few legal hooks that augment the natural landscape (DMCA, contract terms, etc), but remove those and the problem would remain.
So unfortunately, what we're really looking for is some positive government regulations that would make companies have to publish some of their documentation and source code. That's much harder to create and draft, although for a simple first stab I would look at requiring that source code be available to make a work eligible for copyright protection.
I acknowledged the DMCA. The DMCA and other legal restrictions are indeed problems. Another one is likely emissions requirements, which at the very least discourage tractor owners from replacing the computers wholesale.
But even if these legal restrictions were to vanish tomorrow, we'd still be stuck with a similar landscape - most manufacturer control comes from technical restrictions combined with a high rate of churn so even if someone invests the time to figure something out, it quickly becomes yesterday's model. Fundamentally, understanding is more difficult than creation.
The calculus could be different on tractors, which are meant to last a real long time. Except the topic here too is focused on getting companies to positively supply things to help, rather than removing laws that hinder (FTA: "The agreement creates a mechanism to address farmers’ concerns and give them access to resources needed to repair their own equipment, such as diagnostic and repair codes, manuals and product guides.")
So my ultimate point is that you need to move past thinking that a Constitutional "right to repair" law would address these problems. Such a thing would be as ineffectual as the Constitutional "freedom of speech" has been in addressing the social media oligopoly.
Only if the DRM protects a copyrighted work, and even then only if the "protection" goes beyond protecting the software from being executed/used. (Chamberlain v. Skylink)
The DMCA doesn't really care about what you do after. The "DRM" has to directly protect a copyrighted work. By your logic, a CFAA violation is also a DMCA violation.
I’ll believe it when I see it. So far every right to repair compliance on their side has been met with bad faith circumventions. Like making tools available in theory but not actually.
- Repair manuals.
- Reasonably priced replacement parts.
- Give the owner a key to sign / certify any parts they want.
- Give the owner the ability to disable OTA updates.
- Give the government a key to sign / certify parts.
- Give the government the ability to review and delay OTA updates.
I don't want some mega corp in a foreign nation holding the means of food production hostage via parts serialization and DRM.
Fuck lenovo Europe for parts, nothing available for an X1 C6, so around 3-4y old. Had to buy on a customer website hoping for a genuine part. What was Lenovo answer to buy a replacement battery ? Send in your laptop to diagnostic a dead battery.
For a couple of years now I see laptops as consumables rather than as full members of the family of general purpose computers. If they break they are impossible to repair without special tools or sending them in so I just demolish them, pull out the storage device and shred it. The rest can then be safely turned in as electronics waste at the local depot.
It's pretty sad because replaceable batteries have been a thing in just about everything since I was a kid and the idea that laptops are somehow so special that we can't do it because they are thin is ridiculous to me. But apparently that's what the market wants.
> Give the government a key to sign / certify parts.
Bad idea. Very bad idea. We've already seen malware campaigns where governments actually stole signing credentials such as Stuxnet, where the creators managed to get their malware signed by Realtek and JMicron certificates [1].
It's a pity that people are content to just quietly hate from home. If we had the gumption to get off our asses and sabotage our enemies I think the world would be a better place.
Starting a company is the heroic way to solve this problem. I mean head over to the dealership with an angle grinder and just start breaking things.
If the company is truly a threat to your community, and if the damage is targeted and restrained enough to be considered an act of protest and not chaos for the sake of it, then a jury of your peers ought not convict.
In the US we're taught to believe that the market will handle this kind of thing. But it won't. Relatively few of us are in the market for a tractor. We can't all "vote with our dollars" and go buy a tractor from a less shady vendor.
But as a human who likes food, my desire to make sure that nobody has a "press here to make the people hungry"-button is legitimate.
If it turns out that the existing political machinery is ineffective at preventing the creation of this button, US norms provide no recourse. If the government makes you mad enough, you overthrow the government (ideally peacefully).
But what do you do when a private company becomes a significant threat? Send them a strongly worded letter? Companies don't speak english, they're just sensitive to their bottom line. If you want to communicate with them, you have to influence their bottom line.
So I mean that I think we'd all be better off if we considered periodic slashing (drilling, maybe?) of for-sale tractor tires, and other forms of nonviolent sabotage, to be legitimate political speech. If certain lines were crossed, we ought to encourage each other to get off the couch and go practice that speech.
My great uncle hated John Deere (for what reason, I'm not sure). His grandson runs the farm now and there is still not a John Deere in sight. If more people hated John Deere, they would be out of business. You can't survive if nobody buys your product.
I own some John Deere equipment on my farm, alongside equipment from all of the major brands. I find no measurable difference in experience across dealing with those brands, and they are all great compared to other products in my life. Repairability in everyday life is actually quite horrendous compared to farm equipment. My broom broke the other day and I have no idea where to even begin looking for parts to fix it. I'm going to have to buy a new broom to replace it.
When my farm equipment breaks, the parts department at the local dealer will bend over backwards to find what I need.
abuse of broader society (current and future generations) by narrow interests is now the norm. it is very seldom that there is something in the news that is uplifting and illustrative of a system that is actually working to increase broad-based welfare as opposed to opportunistically benefiting the shrewdest or most ruthless operators.
the way things have been organized economically and politically (especially under US late-state capitalism) once a business does well financially it can basically capture its political/regulatory context and control its own destiny by influencing all decisions that affect it. it is no longer a Milton Friedman style rule taker, it is a rule maker.
there are many channels that enable this, both on the incentive side that create the desires to act in such ways and the response side (regulation, laws) that define the corporate interface with society (e.g lack of liability for any externalities created, oligopoly status ("there is no alternative") or revolving door arrangements with regulators and politicians (people shamelessly cashing-in on relations and knowledge)
nothing intrinsically difficult to solve to get to a better place. it does not take a "revolution" to fix democratic, market based, economies. it "only" requires having a moral compass and the transparency and awareness that helps navigating according to its prescriptions. the rest would take care of itself. exorbitant profits, environmental destruction, astronomical wealth inequality etc. are not required for the system to work. they are the result of system that is degenerating in the hands of a particular set of people
Honestly, the only people who hate social media are tech journalists who have an article deadline coming up fast, politicians during election years, and of course HN users.
I believe they have something like 30% in the tractor market in the US but when it comes to specific types of tractors (especially the larger variants) it is much much higher.
Additionally the negative effects of a monopoly can also show in a duopoly or the like. It doesn't even need cartel like collusion.
It's ridiculous that we live in a world where the manufacturer is in the position to set terms of repairs. Once someone buys a piece of equipment it's theirs and they should be allowed to repair and modify it however they see fit.
Deere rose up to being one of the top equipment brands because they put extra effort into ensuring the equipment was repairable. There is a lot of equipment in the scrap heap from other brands that you can't get parts for. Theoretically you can repair them, but the cost to hire someone to recreate/design a one-off part can be extraordinarily expensive. Deere likes to boast that they have parts in stock for equipment that is 75+ years old. Hell, John Deere owns A&I Products, the premier aftermarket farm equipment parts supplier (multiple brands, Deere included). They have no problem with you repairing your equipment.
What happened, however, is that the equipment manufacturers in modern times streamlined manufacturing such that they created a whole line of equipment that is physically identical but differentiated by software unlocks. The problem is that if you were able to repair the software, you would be able to unlock features. It is access to those systems has been closely guarded to prevent piracy, just as all kinds of software has done for 50+ years. They do have a problem with you using software you didn't pay for.
