It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people, "workers of the earth", etc) and hackers (highly technical nerds writing operating systems and engineering compatibility parts) are so connected by this issue. Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.
I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).
Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.
Many people (including comments on hacker news!) have called farmers the original hackers. The amount of bespoke problem solving needed is tremendous. Uniformity in farming is an extremely recent phenomenon.
OpenSourceEcology has the mission to create open source versions of 50 technologies they consider fundamental to "human civilization". One of the few technologies they've actually succeeded in open sourcing is a tractor
Oh I know, a relative was bio-chem at monsanto related to corn... but I normally avoid telling people that because of the stigma it carries (unfair considering the global impact to yield)... now he works tirelessly to reduce invasive species to reduce coastal erosion.
> traditionally thought of as less technical people
You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.
The mass media likes to portray farmers as straw-chewing hicks. It's the farmer stereotype.
I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
Maybe I haven't noticed this since I got inoculated against this notion by the reality of farmers early on.
It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.
All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.
The feds are not in charge of key legislation like the DMCA, and their power to regulate things has been severely curtailed by the supreme court in recent months. If we want these things to change, we need to seek out all of the individuals in the House and Senate who oppose these things and mount systematic campaigns to replace them. And do the same thing at the state level. Demanding that the feds "do something" without clear legislation is not going to work anymore.
We're already seeing another dark cloud on the horizon with Deere. They're almost done with the work to move to single-pair Ethernet on their vehicle bus and leave the traditional CAN/ISOBUS connector behind.
We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.
The shareholders don't care about any of that if they think the board did a decent job of propping up the stock price.
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
The board's goal was to lock-in maintenance with computer security, which failed catastrophically. All previous generations of Deere tractors have on-board electronics that can be jailbroken.
Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
I don’t know where a “bright line” needs to be drawn here wrt jurisprudence, but akin to Monsanto, I have _zero_ doubt that Deere has been crossing it for decades.
Following the Reagan era, the GOP had a period of wanting to reign in the federal government, but I don't think that's quite true now. Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government, they just want to use it to advance different social policies. In the fight between farmers and Deere, I doubt they'd side with the company.
> Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies.
Vance literally wrote the forward to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the organization responsible for Project 2025. It is absolutely relevant.
> project 2025 ... was never endorsed by Trump or Vance.
-ish. It would be more accurate to say Trump holds the Heritage Foundation and their creation in high regard. "This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do" 4/21/22
Eventually, the clear intentions of P2025 became well known. At that point, Trump began distancing himself. I'm guessing that's something you heard about.
However, it's a bit hard to accept his refutations - given that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors. ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Trump’s VP nominee also completely flipped his views in the last few years to join the ranks of conservative grifters feeding off anti-immigrant and anti-“woke” sentiment. I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
The Trump/Vance admin will support whichever side they believe will benefit them financially, which won’t be the farmers.
This will be a tough fight. I'm assuming warranty and second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures. In big purchases, I'd assume it would be a lot like Title Insurance on real estate?
I'm curious where this will ultimately go. Feels like the best path would be a "minimal capability" set that machines need to support at basically a mechanical level? Probably gets a lot more complicated on some of the more advanced gear. Which, really doesn't help the narrative, as people try and show the basic tractors as the only thing impacted.
> second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures
I recall a story of a person who bought a used Tesla which erroneously had some feature or another enabled -- sold by the second-hand dealer and purchased by the customer with the understanding that the car came with the feature -- until the feature was remotely disabled when someone at Tesla discovered the error.
Some of the features that are gated by cars are just silly, such that I'd want to know more about the feature before really having an opinion on this. Is why I would think a "minimal feature set" would be key.
Even in this scenario, though, I would expect you'd need something like the Title Insurance to really protect people?
It would definitely not fall under such a feature set given that it's something that seemingly can be reasonably disabled and only otherwise increases the value of the vehicle. I recall that the buyer thought they were buying the thing with the feature and the seller thought they were selling the thing with the feature when someone uninvolved with the transaction (the original manufacturer, Tesla in this case) changed the deal after-the-fact. It seems a bit moot how one feels about the feature itself when they can observe that the people transacting seem to agree on the value of the feature.
The Feds are coming, and I hope they keep going and going until there isn't a single product or service left that dares dictate what you can do after the transaction is complete.
I've been rolling the idea around that perhaps if a product is encumbered by a subscription then it's not a first sale and the product counts as inventory. And gets taxed as such.
I don't know the first thing about such things, but I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.
I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.
"The main complaining about Deere and other brands are the guys that get mad they hacked the code for the ecu and allowed the engine to rev higher and provide more horsepower. Thus lowering the life of the engine and bypassing certain things like DEF. Then something breaks, and the dealer denies the warranty cause it's obvious they messed with the code. So then they go ape shit and say they should be able to customize their vehicle however they want. I know this cause I used to work at a dealer and this happened every season. They read up on some forum how to bypass stuff and boom, I'm replacing their engine."
Farming.. The ultimate form of corporate welfare..
"This is all a bit misleading. Farmers don’t want to repair their own equipment. They want to be able to call someone on a Sunday when something breaks to come fix it. Which they can’t do today due to restrictions on John Deere’s IP that limits 3rd parties from offering that service."
It's ironic that farmers (traditionally thought of as less technical people, "workers of the earth", etc) and hackers (highly technical nerds writing operating systems and engineering compatibility parts) are so connected by this issue. Some of the farmers I've talked to understand the importance ownership and right to repair better than even many engineers.
That said, I think John Deere is just the asshole willing to weaponize the legal system to enforce their dreams. The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system. I'm not saying we should just delete all those, but they are in bad need of reform and enable a tremendous amount of abuse. The abuse is only going to get worse unless we treat the cause(s) rather than just the symptoms.
I'm glad the feds are giving John Deere some attention, but I really hope they are going to fix the lopsided system instead of just try to bully or micro-regulate John Deere into "voluntarily" allowing more repair. If we stopped unleashing the lawyers on people for modifying or interfacing with devices they purchased, it would shift the balance of power more toward the center (whereas currently the power is almost entirely on the side of the companies).
Even if you have no interest in repairing or "tinkering" with your own stuff, you should be on the side of right to repair.
Many people (including comments on hacker news!) have called farmers the original hackers. The amount of bespoke problem solving needed is tremendous. Uniformity in farming is an extremely recent phenomenon.
eg: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=626534
OpenSourceEcology has the mission to create open source versions of 50 technologies they consider fundamental to "human civilization". One of the few technologies they've actually succeeded in open sourcing is a tractor
https://www.opensourceecology.org/portfolio/tractor/
They also have a 3d printer, a microhouse, a CEB press, and a power cube
https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
Everyone was a farmer until not so long in the past.
Yeah... I grew up on a multi-generational family farm and we hacked everything to repair or extend its functionality.
Or just consider animal husbandry at its roots, OG bio hacking...
Not just animal husbandry. Modern corn is the result of centuries of genetic engineering.
Farmers have long used bio engineering to make crops tastier or more resistant to disease or drought.
Oh I know, a relative was bio-chem at monsanto related to corn... but I normally avoid telling people that because of the stigma it carries (unfair considering the global impact to yield)... now he works tirelessly to reduce invasive species to reduce coastal erosion.
> traditionally thought of as less technical people
You've never met a farmer. Admittedly no one in my family is a farmer, but half of them are loggers, diesel mechanics, or heavy equipment operators. Most of them are ridiculously intelligent and able to fix anything that moves.
Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
I’ve always though of them as business owners with special skills in growing things, auto mechanics, and logistics.
The mass media likes to portray farmers as straw-chewing hicks. It's the farmer stereotype.
I even saw a conversation on here a few months back where someone on here not-so-nicely corrected a user that the big industrial farmers are smart but the rest of them are backwoods hicks that barely know what electricity is.
>Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
Maybe I haven't noticed this since I got inoculated against this notion by the reality of farmers early on.
It still seems surprising to me that this idea can survive more than five seconds of thought. Farmers own tracts of land, lots of equipment, and have to navigate the market for their product, financing, capital allocation, weather patterns, all sorts of random events. They frequently have dozens of employees, and constantly have to negotiate with those, and with customers, and with vendors.
All of this is in addition to the actual growing of crops.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world that this type of person won't take kindly to being dictated to by John Deere (doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway) and would try their hand at a bit of hacking if needs must.
People who’ve never lived in or around rural communities tend to stereotype those populations as country bumpkins. Newsmedia doesn’t help.
The feds are not in charge of key legislation like the DMCA, and their power to regulate things has been severely curtailed by the supreme court in recent months. If we want these things to change, we need to seek out all of the individuals in the House and Senate who oppose these things and mount systematic campaigns to replace them. And do the same thing at the state level. Demanding that the feds "do something" without clear legislation is not going to work anymore.
We're already seeing another dark cloud on the horizon with Deere. They're almost done with the work to move to single-pair Ethernet on their vehicle bus and leave the traditional CAN/ISOBUS connector behind.
We have a number of things that sniff the traffic for important implement data and state and Deere is going to lock it all up. You'll be left with minimal data on the J1939 connector like the automakers did with OBD2.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
system created to protect inventors and authors from being abused by more powerful people(investors, corporations, publishers) is actually used to abuse everyone except powerful groups then yeah - it is a horrible system that needs to go.
> The real problem is laws that protect IP like the DMCA and the patent system.
That is A problem, but that is not the problem seen here. The problem here is trade secrets. Specifically electronic secrets that prevent third parties from fully servicing their own equipment. Like HP inkjet electronic restrictions that prevent people from refilling their own ink cartridges. This is still a problem without patent law, without copyright law, and without lawyers.
> I'm not saying we should just delete all those
It wouldn't be the worst thing. 20 years for a patent may have been sensible a century ago but these days it's almost absurd.
There was also a fatality in the last workplace strike.
Deere seems to have bad relations with their employees, customers, and regulatory bodies.
The shareholders should remove the board of directors.
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/money/business/2021/...
The shareholders don't care about any of that if they think the board did a decent job of propping up the stock price.
Firing a board is generally risky, and the shareholders probably haven't fired them because even though the board has, almost objectively, not been good - firing them is likely even worse for the stock short term, and there aren't a lot of long-term, active investors left in the world.
Tragedy of the commons is why short term is all that matters and will ever matter to non-ideological investors.
If an action that hurts the stock short-term but will help int he long-term needs to be performed why would you as an investor enact it or even stay for the ride?
You are better off either opposing it or selling your stock and then waiting to see if someone will enact the changes, then you have the "insider" information to know that the short-term stock drop was a good thing for the long-term and rebuy the shares cheaper.
The board's goal was to lock-in maintenance with computer security, which failed catastrophically. All previous generations of Deere tractors have on-board electronics that can be jailbroken.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/16/john_deere_doom/
Just for that failure, they should all likely be gone.
Their business is booming. That significantly overwhelms the concern you're raising.
They have gone from $4.3b in operating income to $14.5b in three years, while their sales nearly doubled. That's an old industrial company boom the likes of which is almost never seen by those types of companies.
By comparison what you're calling catastrophic is entirely trivial. It's not even in the room as a consideration compared to the soaring profits. Nobody is removing a whole board with that kind of profit growth.
Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).
Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.
In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.
If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.
Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.
I don’t know where a “bright line” needs to be drawn here wrt jurisprudence, but akin to Monsanto, I have _zero_ doubt that Deere has been crossing it for decades.
Do Apple next
What happens if the GOP wins in a couple of weeks? Would there be any way these actions can be sustainable for more than a few months?
Following the Reagan era, the GOP had a period of wanting to reign in the federal government, but I don't think that's quite true now. Folks like Trump or DeSantis are not pro-small-government, they just want to use it to advance different social policies. In the fight between farmers and Deere, I doubt they'd side with the company.
Data point: Trump's VP nominee likes what the FTC is doing - https://fortune.com/2024/08/11/jd-vance-5000-child-tax-credi...
Alternative data points:
> Under Project 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would be eliminated, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized
> The Department of Education would be eliminated and oversight of education and federal funding for education will be handed over to the states
> The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) would be eliminated and moved to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation if combined with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
> The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s many regional labs and entire offices of enforcement and compliance and scientific integrity and risk information would be eliminated.
> The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is to “privatize as much as possible” and close many hospitals and clinics.
> The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) would be taken apart and send much of its work to states and other agencies
> The Department of Justice (DOJ) would lose its independence and be under control of the President
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would be drastically reduced and split into two entities: one gathering scientific data and one making public health recommendations and policies.
Source: https://www.afge.org/article/project-2025-seeks-to-dismantle...
How is "project 2025" relevant? It's a random blog post that was never endorsed by Trump or Vance.
"never endorsed by Vance"?!
Vance literally wrote the forward to an upcoming book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts, the organization responsible for Project 2025. It is absolutely relevant.
> Donald Trump Says Project 2025 Author 'Coming on Board' If Elected
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-says-project-2025-auth...
> project 2025 ... was never endorsed by Trump or Vance.
-ish. It would be more accurate to say Trump holds the Heritage Foundation and their creation in high regard. "This is a great group, and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do" 4/21/22
Eventually, the clear intentions of P2025 became well known. At that point, Trump began distancing himself. I'm guessing that's something you heard about.
However, it's a bit hard to accept his refutations - given that at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors. ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
> How is "project 2025" relevant? It's a random blog post.
This seems to massively undersell the resources that went into it's creation and promotion. ref:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025
Trump’s VP nominee also completely flipped his views in the last few years to join the ranks of conservative grifters feeding off anti-immigrant and anti-“woke” sentiment. I wouldn’t trust anything he says.
The Trump/Vance admin will support whichever side they believe will benefit them financially, which won’t be the farmers.
This will be a tough fight. I'm assuming warranty and second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures. In big purchases, I'd assume it would be a lot like Title Insurance on real estate?
I'm curious where this will ultimately go. Feels like the best path would be a "minimal capability" set that machines need to support at basically a mechanical level? Probably gets a lot more complicated on some of the more advanced gear. Which, really doesn't help the narrative, as people try and show the basic tractors as the only thing impacted.
> second sale transactions will be much more complicated in some futures
I recall a story of a person who bought a used Tesla which erroneously had some feature or another enabled -- sold by the second-hand dealer and purchased by the customer with the understanding that the car came with the feature -- until the feature was remotely disabled when someone at Tesla discovered the error.
Some of the features that are gated by cars are just silly, such that I'd want to know more about the feature before really having an opinion on this. Is why I would think a "minimal feature set" would be key.
Even in this scenario, though, I would expect you'd need something like the Title Insurance to really protect people?
It would definitely not fall under such a feature set given that it's something that seemingly can be reasonably disabled and only otherwise increases the value of the vehicle. I recall that the buyer thought they were buying the thing with the feature and the seller thought they were selling the thing with the feature when someone uninvolved with the transaction (the original manufacturer, Tesla in this case) changed the deal after-the-fact. It seems a bit moot how one feels about the feature itself when they can observe that the people transacting seem to agree on the value of the feature.
(Looks like it was something to do with Autopilot, for what it's worth. https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-aut...)
It's pretty simple, none of this security lockout crap and hardware needs to be "source available" for electrical schematics and software.
The Feds are coming, and I hope they keep going and going until there isn't a single product or service left that dares dictate what you can do after the transaction is complete.
Say hello to your new Subscription products
I've been rolling the idea around that perhaps if a product is encumbered by a subscription then it's not a first sale and the product counts as inventory. And gets taxed as such.
That is exactly how it should work.
If the user does not own it, someone does and the accounting should play out accordingly.
I don't know the first thing about such things, but I'll bet if companies were pushed on this they'd suddenly start asserting that it's a lease, which I think is typically taxed similarly to a sale.
I hate the "everything's a subscription" business model that's taking over everything. We'll achieve peak serfdom when the air we breathe, water we drink, and food we eat is bought on a subscription model.
A John Deere lobbying ad about how much they have contributed to manufacturing was presented right next to this article.
Ukraine was at the forefront of white hat hacking their miserable machines.
One of the very few things I can appreciate from this administration.
The investigation is going on since 2021, the filing was made public on Thursday.
Only a filthy redneck conspiracy theorist would conjecture that this is populist election influence!
Prepare for the comments that "Lina Khan is on a tear" and this is all not influenced by the election at all.
If you try to lobby against the people who invented lobbying, you're gonna have a bad time.
"The main complaining about Deere and other brands are the guys that get mad they hacked the code for the ecu and allowed the engine to rev higher and provide more horsepower. Thus lowering the life of the engine and bypassing certain things like DEF. Then something breaks, and the dealer denies the warranty cause it's obvious they messed with the code. So then they go ape shit and say they should be able to customize their vehicle however they want. I know this cause I used to work at a dealer and this happened every season. They read up on some forum how to bypass stuff and boom, I'm replacing their engine."
It's about time! Hopefully the FTC has their scythes good and sharp, 'cause Deere most richly deserves the worst that the Feds can do to 'em.
Farming.. The ultimate form of corporate welfare..
"This is all a bit misleading. Farmers don’t want to repair their own equipment. They want to be able to call someone on a Sunday when something breaks to come fix it. Which they can’t do today due to restrictions on John Deere’s IP that limits 3rd parties from offering that service."
There are two alternatives here:
* your food is 5x more expensive as a result of protectionist tariffs
* there are no protectionist tariffs and all of your food is produced in and imported from poor countries who can now use this as diplomatic leverage