Don't get me wrong, I love open source, I love Linus/RMS for giving me such a beautiful product with which I make a living. But it was theirs to give, not mine to take. You have the same strange ethics as RMS, two consenting adults make a trade, based on rules known in advance (ie., you cannot see/alter the source code), no one was hurt and no one has anything to do with this trade... and yet... RMS calls this evil. Again: I prefer open source to anything but the rights are the creators to hand out and the customers to accept or not, that is freedom.
Buy a different Tractor or try to negotiate a deal before you buy a tractor. Or start a forum to gather a lot of people that John Deere may listen to. But don't buy it and then start crying you don't like it.
And "by that logic" I shouldn't post on HN if I don't like downvotes. But I agreed to this system before I post. I won't whine about it afterwards since the possibility of being downvoted/offended existed before I commented. By your logic I should now start to pressure the government to do something about these awfull comments on HN, because I don't like them.
For example, what if the tractor terms say that you couldn't vote Republican or you would have to surrender the tractor? Or you could only use brand-name repair shops. Or that you couldn't open the hood.
Farmers need tractors. It's not like they have the option to not have one and wait forever for a deal that's never going to happen.
Buying means change of ownership and just because you write something into a contract doesn't change that fact.
To finish your example, yes, I would expect the buyer to be able to hack the machine. They bought it and it is now theirs to do with as they please.
In the tractor case, I'd feel more honest (and much better in general) if I would just buy a tractor of a different brand with less stringent conditions attached. Why would you reward a tractor company that sells you stuff under screwy conditions?
First you vote with your wallet and make a screwy company rich, then you complain. Perhaps you should think before you buy something. Or, get a group of people together and make a nice case to the manufacturer. Where do we end if we can just break any agreement we make based on need?
The honest way to get to hackable tractors is to not buy un-hackable tractors. I'm all for hackable tractors, I'm all for hackable everything! So lets buy products that are hackable!
Frankly, if there are conditions, then as far as I'm concerned you're not selling anything. Selling implies a change of ownership. You've done something, but not sold something.
If companies want to attach additional conditions, then they should have to call it something else, and make it clear that the agreement isn't a sale.
Probably because that tractor company is the only one left by either suing its competition, colluding with them to both adopt anti-consumer license agreements, buying them out, or lobbying politicians to making competition illegal by abuse of patent or copyright law.
This is part of the problem. "Contracts" have become one-way rights-limiters which perverts their original intent: For two parties to negotiate terms of a transaction. What we have today are contracts being abused to limit consumers' rights, limit their use of court to challenge them (arbitration clauses), and absolve the corporation of all legal liability that may ever come out of that transaction.
I think that in our age where consumers have no rights, its perfectly ok to enter into one-sided "contracts", then violate the spirit of those contracts by appealing to lawmakers to give consumers their rights back.
I guess you haven't seen John Deere tractors in a while.
As huge a gulf in technology as that may be, retracing over ground that has already been surveyed once is much easier than blazing a trail through wilderness. It only takes 50 years to advance that far in technology the first time you try it. The second time around, it goes much faster and less expensively, especially for everything with lapsed patent protection.
That particular tractor is supposed to be a bootstrapping device, so that in the unlikely circumstance that we do lose the benefit of modern infrastructure, it can mostly be rebuilt before anybody forgets how or why.
With the benefit of the modern manufacturing infrastructure, anyone else could copy a 1995 model of Deere tractor and just leave off the trademark elements.
The LifeTrac is designed around the resources that a self-sustaining OSE community could likely produce or scavenge. It's basically what two people and a rudimentary machine shop could build in a reasonable period of time.
Again, given the run-up in prices for used, owner-repairable tractors, there may be a market for copying the most popular models for new manufacture, and leaving out anything still patented or trademarked. Serious farmers won't build their own LifeTrac unless it is impossible to get a factory-built tractor.
Why are people buying these annoying tractors anyway? The reason to me seems: They are worth the trouble.
Here's the thing. They should be able to lease equipment with restrictions. However, if you're going to call it a sale, then I don't see why they should have the right to restrict your ability to modify it. A sale implies a change of ownership. If they can restrict what you can do with the product after you bought it, then there wasn't really a change of ownership, was there?
Interfering with this process reduces freedom.
Interfering with freedom is necessary, almost everywhere. The very fact that two people can come to an agreement that they would expect to be enforced is a massive interference in freedom. To say nothing of that fact that you seem to be happy to interfere in someone's freedom to tinker with things, but not happy to interfere in the freedom to restrict that freedom. Do you want this "freedom" of yours or not?
It's seen a lot in apartment/house rental contracts, where the renter puts predatory terms in a contract which aren't allowed by local or state laws. They try to enforce because "you signed it" but a challenge in court sees the contract, or at least those terms, scrapped.
> All I see a big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
Sadly, there is no big market opportunity for hackable, open-platform tractors.
in fact, I'll wager that the FUTURE of the tractor INSISTS upon it being open and hackable.
The "Lying EULA that attempts to rebrand a sale a lease" approach is bad for customers and bad for the world at large. It limits human innovation. Human innovation is what defines humanity. Perhaps we could just return to swinging in the trees and eating bananas unless our EULA allows us to walk upright and cook food with Fire(tm)
Pay attention, Tractor companies! pay attention to your customers and stop listening to that shortsighted man in the pinstripe suit trying to cheapen your relationships that MATTER!
You mean a common platform, similar to what iOS is in the computing world? Sounds nice, but I guess we use a different definition of "open".
OPEN TRACTOR API 1.0