Farmers are hacking their tractors because of a repair ban (2018) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802969
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13990266
Edit -- and some more:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10897309
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19900022
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14074894
Are there any forums, GitHub (or other) repositories or other resources for folks to see what's going on and/or to help out? I'd love to see what's available and, if possible, help out myself but I don't even know where to start (I'm not a farmer and live in an "urban/city" environment).
It seems like this industry is "ripe for disruption" but I'm woefully ignorant. What stops farmers from slapping a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino with an array of sensors, GPS, modems and other electronics to "DIY" their tractors and other electronic/automated farm equipment?
I also know of FarmBot [2] but that project looks to be targeted at a different market. I also see OpenFarm [3] but that seems like it's more about knowledge sharing of crop growing rather than the mechanics/electronics/software aspect of farming.
Without the law your open source software would be blocked by DRM and I am sure the companies would attempt to void your warranty if they can find you modified anything.
Louis Rossman has testified to Congress on the matter.
There is no sane reason to use government enforcement to stop people from tinkering with what they own. The only legitimate reason is an end state that is illegal for good reasons like removing a catalytic converter.
If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted 1/2 their budgets to a common open solution, they could break out. If there were a tiny company offering an old school model with modern features at a competitive price, that would be enough. Then, if farmers choose to lock themselves in, it would be a real choice and their own fault.
BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't. Windows still thrives, but people have a choice. Just convince ADM and a few others to throw some pennies at a startup. Except that the new licensing greatly benefits those giants. So you'd have to convince 100s of little guys to throw big money your way.
Right to Repair legislation goes 90% of the way to stopping the lockdown of the machine internals and codifies for everyone that once a machine is sold and in use, the manufacturer no longer has control over that machine.
They absolutely did. Both depend on copyright. GNU licenses in particular were created in reaction to copyright protection being extended to computer programs as if they were literary works. Today, all of free and open source software directly depends on copyright in order to even be recognized as such.
When working in large fields, most tractors aren't hand steered any more but still have an operator in the cab to keep an eye on the implement.
Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.
This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.
I feel like I see the same thing when people I know complain about Apple: if I try to suggest they switch to Android because it doesn't have those problems, they look at me like I have a 3rd arm. I really wonder how much of this problem with farmers being unable to repair their own equipment is self-inflicted, by absolutely refusing to buy from a different vendor.
It's not just their tactic, but stopping them sets the precedent.
Also most news outlets don't have bandwidth for multiple articles about all the other companies doing the same thing, so they are the placeholder for the topic.
Given the way capitalism works in the US now, though, if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.
IMO, the government should be putting a stop to this sort of thing. If you're on this site, then you've seen this happen scores of times in the tech space. But, again, a lot of people on this site are specifically hoping for a buyout like this to make their first couple hundred million, so this is a weird place to complain about a tech monopoly in tractors.
Kubota is a Japanese company; Deere can't just buy them out on a whim. The Japanese government would most likely block it.
As for running RPi or some other open-source or replacement control software, that's not a trivial thing to implement. Even if an entrepreneur releases a replacement control system, it's risky to install it (down time is expensive). Will they support the farmer? Will they be around in a year or two? Etc.
1) Overnight delivery
2) From everything I've read, you cannot go send your kid to town 20 minutes away to pick up a part for a John Deere machine. You have to call and set up an appointment for a service technician to come to your farm to repair the equipment on-site. After all, that's what all this right-to-repair stuff is complaining about: they aren't allowed to repair things themselves any more. And then the big problem here is: what if it's Saturday, and the service technician is off for the weekend, or is booked up all week long? How do you afford to have your operation down all that time because of a failed tractor?
So I don't see how having regional parts depots is useful any more.
So you will still buy the locally supported brand.
There are a handful of farmers doing exactly that. Cost is a major hurdle though. Not so much the cost of the actual hardware (although sufficiently accurate and precise GPS units have only recently started to come down in price), but the opportunity cost of developing such systems. Time spent working on them is time spent away from the farm business. Spending time on improving agronomy and marketing could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue vs. saving $50,000 on a commercial solution that will retain much of its value and can be resold later. It just doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Only those who see it as an exciting hobby will venture down that road.
There is known demand among farmers for repairable tractors, but it costs a moderate amount (more than an individual farmer has) to develop one. So you go raise some investment money to develop the software and then make it back by selling repairable tractors at a profit.
Maybe if you succeed you'll get copycats using your software on their own tractors, but by that point you've already succeeded. It may even help you by growing your ecosystem and making you more competitive against the closed incumbents.
If you just start out selling tractors that are only equivalent to the incumbents and with all the same restrictions, who is going to buy them? The reason people want to buy from you instead of them is that it's possible to repair your tractors. And if people are buying from you, you're making money.
Maybe a few years later the investors decide they might like to make even more by closing things up, but by that point the software is already published for free on the internet (which was what got customers interested to begin with). So if they do all that happens is that someone else starts making repairable tractors, which people still prefer, using the software which is by then free and already exists.
Have people not noticed how much money Amazon makes out of "your margin is my opportunity"? Taking market share from the old guard by making less (but still some) profit per unit is a great way to make money.
from soy farmers in brazil to local contractors bidding on government road work in new york. Everywhere the bigger company, that can have several more machines than it need for the daily operation, all leased with warranty, will destroy the competition that can't lease because of bad credit etc and so will have downtime/missed deadlines/lost harvests because they cannot get repairs on time.
Some big pockets benefit a LOT from all this, not just the dealers.
Also, the root cause for this was when car dealerships start doing this with cars and nobody cared.
Or are JD tractors so far ahead of any competition that their customers just suck it up? There has to be some anti-competitive lock-in for that to be a thing.
We are now at the point patents hamper innovation.
Big hardware is much more difficult than for example software or small consumer devices.
That’s why we barely see any new car manufacturers either. Tesla may make it but it has taken them a very long time and very hard work.
It will take a huge effort to gain market share for a newcomer, and JD can always update their SW to remove DRM if they loose too much to a competitor.
It was discussed at the time, but only a bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292410
With that said, I have a hard time feeling sympathetic for midwestern farmers. They most likely vote straight Republican every election, and I'm pretty sure fixing this problem is something their Congress reps don't care about too much.
> The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). ... Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998
The political blame lies with both popular teams, as they both carry out the will of big business. They divide us over issues of taste, to push their dressed-up authoritarian agendas. Don't fall for it.
As someone that grew up in a pure Red state for decades and grew up on a farm/ranch, there is zero chance of them voting Democrats for the reasons you think they should.
Want to know at least one reason why? Know those farm "subsidies" democrats love to hate? Also known as: the government pays for farmers to keep fields fallow so we don't get another dust bowl. Farmers like those subsidies, they're a good thing. City people hate them, think they're a bad thing "we spend taxes for farm states". Yes I'm overgeneralizing but i've real work to do today so I can't get super complex.
Get to know a few farmers and understand that your perspective on Democrats is highly skewed on their policies towards places with population centers. You can argue Republicans are worse in as many ways as you want, but until you understand why none of those ways matter to farmers, you'll forever lack an understanding of why things are the way they are.
Could it be because those same farmers turn around and vote against government handouts for everyone else?
So they get rather angry at being forced to farm every acre of land knowing it will spite themselves later. Its a bit more complex than anyone makes it out to be. But easier to just call farmers dumb and that they vote against their interests. Which is ultimately self defeating and ignores the realities of modern farming and the history of how we got here.
Perhaps its possible to value-judge people based on different factors than what your chosen political side would have you judge them on.
Your side wants you to hate and fear the Other because thats what gets people to the polls.
Whats good for farms is good for America, and sometimes that means prioritizing things like taxes, land use, and commodities trading over niche technology needs.
Despising them because they vote differently from you is in this case literally biting the hand that feeds you.