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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

I like that companies are realizing you don't necessarily have to be a tech company to see value in publishing open source software!

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Indeed - we see some really innovative uses of OSS on GitHub from companies you wouldn't expect. Software is an enabler of their business, initially; then, it becomes totally interwoven.

One of my favorites? John Deere. https://github.com/johndeere

John Deere are pretty cool. My college is 20 minutes away and they hire a lot of interns throughout the year.

But their practices regarding their 'hardware' is not so cool. http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/

I recall John Deere became infamous for trying to DRM their tractors to hell, so that only official authorized ($$$) workshops are allowed to fix anything.

Ah, yes, a bit of googling brings something up: https://boingboing.net/2015/05/13/john-deere-of-course-you-o...

I mean, if I were a farmer or had a reason to own a tractor for some other reason, I'd avoid them. Then again, the cynic in me thinks that everybody is doing this, JD just got caught and their ham-fisted PR response made it an order of magnitude worse for them.

It'll be interesting to see how they progress on this front in the near term. I recall just a few years ago that Ford was extremely closed off with their developer toolkit on their SYNC systems; slowly, as they realize that collaborative development can take place with no impact to central functions of the vehicle's operation, they can open up the ecosystem a little bit.

That's all an ideal state, of course; reality is wrought with questions over who owns what, etc. but I'm optimistic.

Now if they'd just release their tractor firmware so people can actually repair and control the 50-250k USD machines that they _own_, then I may respect them.

Nike would disagree with you and point out that they consider themselves a tech company, especially now that they are moving into the health tracker business (not to mention their shoes require science and research to develop).

"Software is eating the world." Every company is a tech company now. If you are a retailer you want to have a website. You want to do shopping cart analysis. You want to analyse what products and what quantities to stock. Once you reach scale and you want to keep an edge you need to build your own software. I used to ask the time see job ads for Wal-Mart Labs. Why would this be different for any other company?

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