Well it kinds looks like your car manufacturer stating in the manual that your car cannot tow.
You know it just a matter of installing one, but they basically don't want to spend time supporting something they have no interest in.
You know it just a matter of installing one, but they basically don't want to spend time supporting something they have no interest in.
I work for John Deere, it is well known that ECU code can change the horse power of our tractors. What isn't as well known is the tractors with higher horsepower ECUs have more warranty work, and that is a case where we engineer the system for the change (there is more than an ECU changed in getting higher horsepower if you buy it that way from us because we don't want warranty claims)
If you know what the real limits of your system are you will sometimes discover the stated limits are less than the real limits. However other times the stated limits are there for a reason.
Better than coming out of it looking like the evil dudes.
EDIT being most well known outside your sector for suing your customers is generally a bad look
- Well, we stated that you shouldn't do what you did...
- It doeesnnn't work !!!"
Ensue time, energy and money lost to defend yourself against idiots who don't listen.
Edit : I don't know anything about trucks or John Deere. But you can see this type of "artificial" limitation with simple unlock pretty often. For example the cpu overclocking community : the manufacturer doesn't officialy support overclocking, but they give hints and some advice if you want to do it anyway. You fry your cpu, you're on your own.
I'll also point out that you probably were mad at VW for making the types of modifications that you claim anyone should be able to make.
It's kind of funny, because parts DRM could be seen as the manufacturer breaking the device when a replacement could have succeeded.
If the tractor is rated for 50 whatever and you chip it to run at 60 whatever and sell it without saying that you'd ever done so, then if the buyer finds damage caused by overheating or who knows what from running at 60 whatever on a 50-rated-and-softlocked engine, then you absolutely could be held liable for failing to indicate the non-factory modifications you made to the engine, even if you later 'removed' them.
(Usual disclaimer: I am not your lawyer, I will not compile citations for your review, please seek legal counsel before taking action based on my comments.)
Honestly, I'm a fan of price discrimination through DRM. It leads to better economic efficiency. But John Deere DRM must really be something else. I'm not even in the field and I have a negative reaction to the brand. Like they're going to nickel and dime me and then give me the run-around on fixes.
I don't really see too much of a difference between buying a tractor from John Deere and buying a fancy SAN from Oracle. In either case you're paying a premium for the name and the associated service contract for a time-sensitive mission-critical locked-down (and to some extent black-box) function which is presumably crucial to your business's ability to generate revenue. JD have competitors, and I'd imagine that if this episode hasn't tanked their business it's due to risk-aversion from buyers (à la IBM), vendor lock-in, or customers being set in their ways.
It's also a bit like the Creative sector when Adobe moved to a subscription model; people balked and held out for a time, but ultimately they voted with their wallets and bought [subscriptions to] the magic product that could be provided by only one company on Earth, and without which they couldn't possibly continue to make art-work [commercially, in a productive manner, and in keeping with their prior experience].
I'm just cynical about how often people will knowingly make themselves reliant on a single company without reading through the small print or thinking through the implications of what is essentially entering into a long-term strategic partnership with a vastly unequal partner without a having a hedging strategy. If you can't imagine not using their products after the next refresh, you've put yourself in a very poor negotiating position.
Right-to-repair is all about people being able to repair their own products, or at the very least use certified 3rd-party mechanics, instead of being forced to go to the manufacturer for every possible problem.
Besides, if you have ever used a warranty recently then it’s a good bet that it was legislated to act that way. Right to repair is similar in focus to help consumers.
All that minimum warranty legislation does is to remove the freedom that people previously had to buy products with shorter warranties, or without one. It means that they can't even buy the same product together with an optional warranty from the manufacturer, thereby ending up with a situation that's functionally identical. Warranties for practically every type of durable product existed before these changes were introduced, and people have always tended to weigh up the projected lifetime (which they can infer from factors such as the availability of manufacturer or third-party warranties or insurance), manufacturer reputation and projected total costs of ownership whenever they have bought something sufficiently expensive.
Agriculture is of course an important industry, but I don't think there's any wider threat to agriculture in this particular case, and if these practices were to create one in the future, the market would respond by punishing a company like JD (and no doubt the state would as well in light of the strategic implications). It just seems like a slow and painful realisation for parts of the industry that things have changed. Hopefully we'll now see plenty of disruption and innovation (and modding ;)).
I think it’s rather that it was introduced in a domain where users historically can (and often need) to be able to do more or less anything as many operations are extremely time-sensitive and they generally live in the ass-end of nowhere, CA. Any measure which can (and does) hamper the ability to do the thing right here right now without huge benefits to compensate is an active threat.
Me too, because it means I can buy the cheapest version and unlock it for free.
We have a vendor that sells equipment with a built-in engine, and we use some of the power from that engine to run other equipment. Under Tier-4 emissions requirements the vendor moved to all-digital controls, which have a much tighter control on power output. Our customers are annoyed that they can't get the same amount of power out of the new equipment. Our vendor tells us, unofficially, you could tweak the ECU and get more power out, but we're not going to do that to equipment we're selling, and we're not going to tell our customers to do that, because it would violate the legal restrictions on The operation of that equipment.
I 100% guarantee you there are people who will call Nvidia support (yes, they will literally dial +1-800-797-6530 on a phone like it's 1972) to complain about broadcast. Some people are unbelievably entitled, and think that no matter what it says on the box if they paid good money for it then it should by God do whatever stupid ass thing they want it to do.