Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors
farms.com
farms.com
I've tried to make pleas with some of my old friends who've complained about the locked-down nature of their JD equipment, explaining that other companies like Kubota don't have that same limitation, but the branding is just too strong ("the Kubota might be cheaper to buy, and cheaper to run, and I can easily maintain it myself, but, it's not a John Deere" - actual quote from a SW Ontario farmer)
It's sort of comparable to writing software in C (an ISO standard with many open source compilers) to run on your commodity x86 hardware versus writing an iOS Apple Store app. In one case, you have almost complete control of the HW and SW, in the other, you have no control and can be prevented from doing so at any moment for any reason.
I'm not saying this is the right way for ag. to go forward. But all our incentives right now are to either specialize a small farm around high margin product or scale as wide as possible on low margin product. That is going to set a lot of people on the course of basically renting their equipment and deferring the maintenance to the provider.
We probably should create some incentives for farmers to be more self reliant. That would probably be good for our sustainability but I don't think we should ignore that currently the choice isn't black and white.
A high MSRP means a lot of room to play with the numbers.
1. Disenfranchise everyone who hasn't voted in the last 10 years.
2. Require a two-year waiting period from the time you register as a voter before you can vote. Require registrations to be renewed every 6 years. Voting automatically renews an unexpired registration.
It seems to me that both proposals should attract a lot of attention. But one is more alarming than the other. And you could water it down to be even less alarming and make some good arguments for your proposal. This is how you boil a frog.
Here's one nobody seems to care about:
3. Require people to join a private club to be able to vote in primary elections. Only allow candidates who were nominated by those private clubs. Allow the private clubs to be controlled by a handful of people.
You know, now I think about it, right-to-repair has a great deal in common with right-to-vote.
My grandfather had an old Massey, and several others for parts. It's easy to idealize this from afar (I do), but young farmers often don't want it.
That said, the individual preference and the systemic trend are two different things. The right to repair, is also the right to have a 3rd party repair. Competition, choice. At some point along the trend, it's about more than that. There comes a point where "who actually owns this farm" starts to be a question. JD might exercise the same power over farmers that Apple exercises over app developers. A my way or the highway world.
I have most of the major brands in my shed. I don't particularly care much about what colour I'm using. Purchases have been made based on cost, which has included some green equipment when a great auction find has been found.
My experience says that JD has the UX nailed. When you're spending 12 hour days in the seat, the little things do start to make a big difference. I am not sure it is fair to be dismissive of it as being a result of great branding. The equipment is meant to be used and the experience and comfort while using it can most definitely be worth a premium to many.
What UX? A terminal?
Linux is also only an operating system kernel.
The MacOS terminal is... so-so. I mean, it's not horrible, but it is also not great.
I am not convinced that Apple kit has the best UX (and I am in the same room as two macs that I alternate between).
My comment above was just a reflection of a connection I hadn't made before. :)
Developing software at John Deere was frustrating, but they have some really fun, interesting problems and other, larger political/cultural problems.
They should still want right to repair for the same reason that most of the internet wants to run on GPL software. Almost all the companies pay some vendor for it, but unlike the farmers they can just take their business elsewhere if a vendor turns bad.
Being a business is the reason you want right to repairs. If a single vendor can bankrupt your business then it's not a sustainable business. Right to repair give you cheaper options for repairing your tools.
Deere and Kubota only really compete at the smaller/utility side of things.
Also the reason people get locked into Deere isn't just the tractors, but the vertical integration. Can you run your John Deere NT or DB series planter with Greenstar 2 on a Kubota? Possibly, but you've got to buy the hardware from Deere and you'd have to add auto steer, etc. (FWIW Kubota doesn't even sell planters)
You what? Being able to repair and control your hardware is good in itself. It doesn't need to be justified, except as a means to counteract the much stronger lobby that is trying to destroy it.
Your point about this maybe being a ruse is like the one that maybe climate change is a ruse: so what if it is? The measures we introduced to combat the (perceived?) threat will result in a net benefit to society, the environment and individual freedoms. Boo, hoo I'm living in a better world unnecessarily. Very tragic.
1. Professional - Usually highly educated, good business sense. Probably obtained an advanced degree in agriculture science, though not always, some self-educate very successfully. These farmers generally do not like John Deere and think they are overpriced, not as good as they once were, and find the lack of right to repair infuriating.
2. Uneducated - Likely barely passed high school due to a complete lack of effort, because they were going to be farmers and school, "couldn't teach them nothin." Farming is an identity for these individuals. Buying a John Deere is part of that lifestyle. Some kids grow up with a Ferrari on their wall, these kids had a John Deere tractor. The problem with these individuals as it relates to business is that they do not understand business or accounting and probably only have a rudimentary understanding of ag science. They overspend on equipment and their only basic ag science understanding leaves them unable to adapt as well as the pros to droughts, infestations, and other adverse conditions.
3. Gentleman Farmers - Usually educated, but perhaps in an unrelated field. Farming is a hobby. Perhaps a retirement "job." If they make money, great, if not, well, they have money to spare. They buy John Deere, because they can afford it and because it seems like the obvious choice. They are happy to pay their local dealer to fix or repair their tractor, it is something they don't have to worry about and costs are not a real going concern. Breaking even is a success.
Both the less educated farmers and the gentleman farmers treat John Deere tractors as a status symbol (every other farmer know exactly how much a John Deere tractor costs). And when you know how much they cost it is like seeing someone drive by in a Ferrari or Lamborghini, because, well, they cost as much as a Ferrari or Lamborghini, if not more. The professional farmers could care less because they are running a business.
JD tractors were and are reliable and top tier in quality, that's why they are popular and that's why people stick to the brand. I've built Kioti tractors when I was teenager. They'd do the job if you had to use it, but it's no JD in terms of quality.
Farmers just want the quality they've always had with JD but the ability to fix simple stuff like they used to without it costing them an arm and a leg.
The stereotypes you listed off don't sound like anyone I've ever experienced. They sound like caricatures you painted in your head with your lack of understanding.
Also, maybe never try to shove people into categories, especially only 3 categories. Especially one category being "uneducated". You reached all that from a topic about repairing tractors and their choice of brand. Think about that.
Your "anecdote" doesn't match my experience and it lines up with an outsider perspective with a dash of elitism. You said you don't know anything about AG science, so how could you judge others knowledge of it?
And I am sorry I came across as elitist, I grew up lower to lower-middle class, and my parents grew up dirt poor. As my mother would say, "you come from a long line of poor farmers."
I judge because those students who actively refused to learn were my peers...sometimes my relatives. Again, I would say it was 50/50. Some of those individuals were very well off, and now struggle to manage the farm they inherited. Others grew up in poverty and now have advanced degrees, or have otherwise educated themselves and run a very successful farm or now own a very successful farm.
> The problem with these individuals as it relates to business is that they do not understand business or accounting and probably only have a rudimentary understanding of ag science.
> their only basic ag science understanding leaves them unable to adapt as well as the pros to droughts, infestations, and other adverse conditions."
So please tell me, how did you come to realize these faults in these people you met. Did they explain to you that their accounting was bad, did you see their books, did you test their soil, did you see them struggle with an infestation, or are you simply guessing and hurling insults?
Since you prefixed your statement with "probably" I'm going to guess that you're using the #2 category to shit on a group of people while the #1 category is used to argue your point that smart farmers support your conclusion that john deere = bad.
This situation has nothing to do with "uneducated farmers" and everything to do with JD being the top tier brand but also shafting its customers by not allowing them to repair their product.
Kubota doesn't come close to JD, especially in larger tractors and integrations.
You may disagree with the model used, but it was clearly an opinionated one based on personal experience. If you have a different one, then we can all compare, contrast and hopefully continue a curious conversation.
He shoved "uneducated farmers" into the same group of people that idolized John Deere for the brand alone, but did not offer any connection between the two.
Typical HN elitism. My anecdotes do differ, and it's mostly generational. Either you're a younger farmer that has gone to A&M and you're heavy into Ag Science or you're more old school and you use techniques passed down. Or you're a big time operator and none of this applies.
Nothing to do with what OP said.
Talking about anybody’s education level, specifically when saying they can’t do or understand something because of it, is extremely offensive and hateful.
At this point it's better to buy a Kubota to avoid the lock-in, but JD is still far superior when it comes to the attention to detail.
They simply said that there exist a category of farmers who do not participate in the normal schooling system and choose brands based only on status. This phenomena exists for nearly all brands. You can't possibly be disputing that these people exist?
Keep away from ad hominem attacks, they only serve to dilute your argument.
No, education is generational. Most younger farmers have gone to a good ag science school like A&M. Most older farmers don't have an education but have tons of experience and use techniques passed down that are essentially the same as what is taught in schools.
Whether you brand whore or not is not based on your education status, which is what OP suggested.
Almost a veblen good but not quite by traditional definitions.
FWIW the lock-in for farming in terms of equipment and seed product is so bananas to me. Really feels like the large corpos have got everyone squeezed.
John Deere has a significant toy business that has to pay off big time considering how many of these customers they produce (and the toys themselves are quite expensive IIRC).
For one thing, who in the heck lives in a rural area knows that many types of farmers. Farms are huge and school district areas are small.
But back to the point, your parent stated the person was lying and you defended it. Do you mean to say we must say whatever and lie to advance an agenda?
Right to repair also covers independent/third party service. People may not want to repair the hardware themselves, but they may want to take it to a cheaper/closer third party to repair it. The local JD service may be in the next county, but there may be a local mechanic that could repair the tractor, but cannot due to restrictions, licensing, etc.
Of course you may not want the local guy to try because they may not be competent enough, but people think that should be the owner's decision, not the manufacturer's.
Is your core competency farming or tractor repair? That said, I am sympathetic to farmers who want to repair their equipment. There's a scale where you have enough free time that with simple enough equipment, it does make sense to repair it yourself.
Unfortunately this trend is everywhere now. It happened to servers, media, has started to happen to cars... but it's happened already to agricultural hardware.
Super profitable if you are the provider (especially with all the data one can yield from operating the hardware), super annoying and frustrating if you are the consumer.
So any gains in lifespan are reaped by the company, not consumer
If there's no market for old hardware, there's no benefit to making new products which hold their value.
Not even your phone?
Higher TCO, lower ROI, but hey those quarterly reports look great...
Then they should stop selling hardware and start renting it; but they don't do that, as that signals an honest intention to the customer and I'm pretty sure comes with a bunch of legal restrictions, both obvious and subtle. Instead, they want all the money and lack of liability that comes from selling something outright to someone else, and yet they still somehow want to maintain total control over the device in the field in order to extract revenue over time and, notably, spy on their customers. The result is that these technological locks that side-step the notion of ownership and turn every object you purchase into a sleeper agent for the manufacturer; and, as you note, no one wants to actually sell things anymore as it is going to be more profitable to build in all of these locks, so "voting with your dollars" has become all but impossible unless you either are willing to tolerate not only paying more (which is fine) but getting a shit product (as none of the good manufacturers even bother offering "own your hardware" as an option no matter how much you are willing to pay) or have so much money that you can build an entire company to commission custom hardware. :(
> "voting with your dollars" has become all but impossible
If possessing is more often than not the best way someone may understand it and also understand when smart farmers will also understand it, then develop an adequate offering, and if it performs better most will understand. It is only "more profitable to build in all of these locks" when you have customers. Am I delusional?
Simple but excellent point. We should just start calling it what it is. xbox game pass, adobe software, it's all just renting. Subscriptions are supposed to be for access to new stuff, not continuing access to the existing stuff.
I own a lawn mower. In fact I usually own two lawn mowers--the new one and the one I just need to repair a bit.
All of my neighbors own lawn mowers. We all use our lawn mowers about an hour per week. It's extremely wasteful to purchase 5 lawn mowers to perform 5 hours of mowing per week.
We could all hire Suwanda down the street to mow our lawns, but that would cost a lot more than buying a mower. That's mostly because of the labor costs. So what if Suwanda just rented the mower to us and charged us enough to keep the blade sharp and the engine tuned? And what if we didn't pick it up and return it to Suwanda? What if we just passed it around between us, and Suwanda was the 6th stop in the rotation?
And every once in a while, the person who got it after Suwanda noticed it was a completely different mower. So 5-6 neighbors pay $5/month and always have a mower in tip-top shape, but never actually maintain it and never shop for a new one.
We'll start with mowers and expand into kitchen blenders and frying pans. We'll displace Amazon in about 15 years!
I would love it if you could solve this sort of social issue, but I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of doing so. Successfully making people feel responsible for shared tools is almost equivalent to "building a better society". It's a worthy goal, but people have been trying to do so for basically all of human history.
https://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/oakland-tool-lending-li...
https://oaklandlibrary.org/locations/oakland-tool-lending-li...
most farms in America are corporate monoliths. "farmers" here want mttf, mtbf, metrics, and a projection of how many cam chains, PTO knuckles, lockout converters, etc... they will need to buy in 30 years of depreciable service for a machine. They want to be able to carve the machine they own down to the last cent...the only way to do that is to turn your IH or Komatsu into a rolling cloud. even the windshield wipers get a sensor.
smaller farms with actual farmers that wear hats and overalls already balk at a million dollar sticker shock from a harvester, and if you ever go to a farm and take a look around, most tractors there are nearly sixty years old. the priority is farming, not investor return. The tractor needs to perform its stated function first before anything else matters. service interval warnings and degraded performance alerts here are a failure condition the farmer works around. they arent incentivized to stop what theyre doing at 4:15 AM and call up the local JD dealer 143 miles away for an appointment. there isnt a second tractor.
If legislation isnt passed, ultimately youll end up with what commecial trucks got in response to sensor overkill: Gliders. gliders are 60 year old truck drivetrains and engines that get a new cab and body parts, and get recertified for the road. they belch smog and roar like a freight train at idle, but all thats grandfathered into EPA legislation. New manufacturers get to crank out fleet machines at high prices, and owner/operators get their old reliable filling the parking lot with NOx and waxy sulfur haze at 4 am. they become a market that manufacturers refuse to tap, because it cannot be fully exploited to the disadvantage of the operator.
When I worked as a farmhand we were still using some 1950s Massey Ferguson tractors every day.
An it's one of the biggest dairy farms in the province (Canada).
I mean we had newer stuff too, but the old machines were kept chugging along. I remember opening a sideplate on a MF 135 after one of the kids jammed up the transmission.
We got it unstuck with a crowbar, and were up and running again in 15 minutes.
I doubt any gliders are running 60yo engines unless you meant 60 year old engine technology. Most likely pre EPA 2006 to avoid the DPF and later EPA 2010 SCR systems. I'd guess the popular glider engines would be Cummins big cam's, CAT 3406's, and maybe S60 Detroits.
Sounds like a market failure if there is money left on the table but no competitor who wants to grab it for themselves.
This trend needs to stop. I cannot fathom how anyone thought preventing farmers, FARMERS for crying out loud, the people who grow our goddamn food, from repairing their equipment is way, way beyond me..
Apple can just not fuck with this independent people, let them have access to the same repair documentation and parts their own people have access.
Apple is the poster child for hostility to independent repair
Apple's goal (same with other manufacturers like JD) isn't to eradicate independent repair. They just want to make it economically in-viable so that third-party repair disappears and most consumers choose to buy new.
The problem becomes real when your tesla/tractor/mercedes/phone is 10yo (phone a bit less) and available for cheap on the second hand market... it's not under warranty anymore, financially it's not worth it to have a dealer fix it, if you can do it yourself, but you're unable to do so, because you don't have the schematics and/or parts available.
So, the large industrial farmers don't really care... it's the "little guys" who get fscked by companies like JD/tesla/apple,...
The users down the line may have greater concern, but they are limited to what is available on the used market. If the first generation users choose John Deere, that means they are effectively limited to John Deere.
I don't think that's how that works. My grandparents own and operate a very respectable size farm for being independent and they definitely do not trade in their tractors like that. I'd be skeptical that mega-farms do this too. Even with cars the majority of the market buys second-hand, which is why the few who buy new every 5 years have someone to sell to. Tractors are an order of magnitude more expensive and independents who might consider paying good money for second-hand equipment are vanishing quickly.
But making a monopoly on providing parts and services is not a good thing. People end up paying 2000 dollar for a 2 dollar repair.
Imagine the world when buying a new car/truck/tractor is less expensive than replacing the brakes for example. This is how the world works right now.
That's the entire world economy. Have you watched Shark Tank? "What do you sell it for and what is your landed price." Mark is smiling and clapping at the people who manage to sell a $2 part for $100, the bigger the ripoff the more he loves it, they've achieved the American Dream.
The reality in the Apple/John Deer situation is that the profit is going back into overfunding design to also make better products. Not all of it, but enough to keep a persistent edge over competitors.
The only explanation given in this thread seems to be ‘branding’.
But i think the same problem is for cars, you cannot e.g. repair your Tesla everywhere, this is also very closed.
The repairment-strategy for Teslas in Germany seems to be pretty simple. You just buy a new one :-)
McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4
Many car dealers don't make their money from selling cars, they make most of their money from being the only authorized repair shop for said car model. And to keep the warranty valid, you need to service the car at an authorized shop.
EVs, by design, don't require as much maintenance or as often as ICE cars. This will result in a disruption in the existing chain at some point. We'll see what actually happens in 5-10 years.
Magnusson-Moss repudiates this for US consumers.
Also EVs require some specific knowledge and equipment random Mom & Pop shops won't have for a while. Just working with HVDC systems alone is a huge hassle.
Some dealers are basically in the business of originating loans.
It all depends on how the owner happens to structure the business.
Often you'll have multiple dealers in the same network that take a different route because that's what works for their brand and location niches.
Brakes, coolant, tires, gearbox oils? Your EV still has all that. The power unit itself on an EV may be simpler, but mechanical failures in an engine in an ICE car are pretty damn rare. You're not servicing anything inside the engine, just like you're not taking apart the electric motor in your EV for maintenance.
I've owned cars with 200k km in them an I would describe them as "beaters" at best. I've had to replace clutches, radiators, turbos and god knows what else and they haven't even gotten close to the 300k km mark.
As for my EV, the first maintenance on schedule that isn't just replacing the air filter is at 160k km. I've saved hundreds if not thousands just from scheduled oil changes at that point.
Pot, meet kettle. EVs and Plug-in Hybrids cost less to maintain than ICE vehicles. [1] Over 200k miles, ICE vehicles are about double the maintenance cost of EVs or Plug-in hybrids.
At 50k miles; EVs $600, Plug-in $1,050, ICE $1,400.
100k miles; EVs $2,000, Plug-ins $2,600, ICE $4,400.
200k miles; EVs $6,300, Plug-ins $5,900, ICE $12,300.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/owning-an-electric-car-...
What they are missing is that they are only better because people buy them, thus funding the improvement of the next generation.
If you want open alternatives, buy them. If you want them to get better, campaign for others to buy them.
Trying to force companies whose business is based on closed products to do what you want, is not going to go well.
So a company selling seeds (with a no-reselling clause in their contracts) could buy that information, make a good guess at a farmer's profit margin, and individually adjust their pricing to the maximum that each farmer would be willing to pay.
Yet another way in which big players can abuse information asymmetry.
Solution here is to not allow for the asymmetry. So much of society’s ills are caused by incentives to keep information asymmetric, so that market participants cannot make optimal (to all) informed decisions.
Repairable tractors would be a huge boon. I wish to anyone listening that Deere, New Holland, Valtra, Fendt and co would produce properly repairable, open heavy hardware.
Deere is the worst in this, but the rest of the industry isn't anywhere near as good as it should be.
There's a reason you see old Defenders, Fourtraks, Rangers, Hiluxes and their ilk around so much on farms. They're mechanically simple, which means you can repair them and keep them going basically indefinitely. Compare that to a modern Deere 7 series for example, and whilst the Deere is more capable, if something goes wrong, you're basically screwed. I've no problem with the hardware getting more advanced, but that same maintainability needs to be baked in.
The problem is, no-one seems interested in shaking things up there, and the manufacturers aren't in any hurry to change. They're a conservative bunch who don't need to, and for whom it's directly more profitable to make machines which can't be repaired by anyone other than themselves and people they authorise.
Sure, a Kubota, Belarus, or JCB is better than a Massey or John Deere, but none are as good as they should be.
It's just not in the same league. They're very much light duty tractors.
Late 80s and early 90s Toyotas will be sold at a premium as will any/all old Ford F-150 trucks.
Things can be different in your country.
The main promoters of this idea are the independent diagnostic car machines makers. For the brand is a lot of risk and possible bad publicity.
For the farmer the results can vary. Messing with its electronics could turn the tractor into a pile of garbage. Allowing the owner to mess with safety systems will typically lead to somebody realizing that can delay the repair for some months just inactivating the warning lights. People do the same all the time with car airbags. As farmers typically earn money after the harvest, they could be working for many months with a fake sense of safety. And as people love to brag, this could became quickly a popular option and a big mess
JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.
Who wants to pay more than they have to? I usually want to pay even less than I have to.
Part of the problem here is that in any other sort of <blank>-as-a-service model, you'd be paying MUCH less for the "service" than the <blank>. In this case, you're buying the capital equipment, and then being forced to buy a service contract in order to use it as expected, and keep it running. It'd be like buying an iPhone, needing to rent iCloud storage to make it convenient, not being able to service it (in any meaningful way), and then only being able to run apps from the App Store. Oh, wait. It's the same problem, with the same ethical and moral conundrum. In our society, a lot of us have accepted this deal for a $1,000 phone. However, it's a bit different when you're shelling out upwards of half a million for a modern tractor.
You may be right, but, if so, this is just another move by a massive corporation to create a vertical monopoly, and extract all the rent in the space. For at least a couple of decades, companies with massive fleets of tractors sweep through the country, working farm fields for the owners, as the seasons change across the states. Your statement makes it seem as if JD could be muscling in on this already-muscled market. Tractors have already been priced out of a lot of farmer's businesses. They may as well cut out these middlemen.
Cutting out intermediataries is what cloud computing is all about. I don't really see this as any different.
So let me ask you, when you take your car in for service and the mechanic says "that will be $100", do you say "no no I can afford $150 so that is what I am going to pay"?
it seems odd to me that you believe only farmers do not want to pay "more than they have to for anything", I am pretty sure that applies to all persons, and all businesses
Then they should be honest about it and rent the tractors rather than pretending to sell them.
Farmers are also being squeezed by their customers - prices for farm produce have been steadily falling for over a century, see e.g. [0].
JD's commercial model requires both capital outlay in purchasing equipment, and committing to a maintenance contract that the farmer can't influence. So the farmer loses control of maintenance costs whilst also under pricing pressure for their produce.
I can't speak to your experience obviously, but farming for many is a (very) low margin business.
[0]: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...
The vitriol that was extended by a couple of the associates (middle managers) to one of my programmers who was vegan was absolutely amazing. He just would ask if there was any dairy in something a they would go off on him. Around that time I also stopped having dairy for health reasons, but that was okay. I had previously been sympathetic to farmers and the dairy community, but after that, I was appalled. Farmers are getting what they deserve.
Who wants to pay more than they have to for anything? Who wants to pay for anything at all? How does a desire to save money make farmers different from the rest of us?
> JD is moving to a Tractor as a Service model. JD does not want to open up their systems because before not long, you just hire a robotic service to come and plow or harvest your fields. JD sees this coming and wants to be in the best possible position to market its services to land owners.
If JD wants to sell their equipment as a service, there's nothing stopping them from doing just that. But it sounds more to me like they want to retain the rights they would have in a service model while continuing to charge the prices they do for a product model. They cannot just sell their tractors as a product and treat them like a service when it's convenient.
> However, most companies refuse to make those tools available to farmers, making it exceptionally difficult to fix broken machinery on their own. They can’t even go an independent mechanic, since manufacturers won’t sell them parts or diagnostic tools either. This leaves farmers essentially no choice but to take their broken equipment to a licensed dealership.
> This isn’t cheap. A farmer might spend thousands of dollars on a simple adjustment they could have done themselves with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.
This is a part of a larger pattern. Our current underlying system "keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits". The current system enables "an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – [which] restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity" [1].
Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. It will allow many more people to become skilled and able. I think we will look back at this phase of human civilization in horror; IP systems are an excessive way of dominating people and stifling their growth.
[1] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...
Excluding airplanes, jet engines, rockets, transistors, git, etc.
The Langley prototype fell into the Potomac like a sack of wet cement, and cost 20 times in government funding what the Wrights spent on their entire R+D program. Langley clearly had not solved any of the problems necessary for controlled, powered flight.
Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community.
> the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation
For me this is as much a myth as the good old "the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor"
P.S. the assembly line (invented in a free market country) is not about rapid prototyping. Prototypes are not built on an assembly line.
Maybe monetary incentives are important for innovation. And I don't think it's perfect at all, but abolishing it also seems a bit rich.
> Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community.
What does that proof? You can't pretend that this would work universally.
Anyone can (and has) form a commune in the US, too. There's nothing to stop you.
Citation needed.
I like open source software, but let's just say often you don't want OSS community to design an interface or maintain it.
Inkscape is on one hand a great tool, on the other hand, it just bogs down doing routine things like zoom or rotate canvas.
If it is anything like cars, then I would think the technology increases chance of failure and actually just increases the cost of doing business; especially when they have to wait to do simple things.
Cars 40 years ago did just fine getting from A to B, had air conditioning, radio, and worked reliably. Cars now are finicky, spy on you, and very expensive to repair. It makes me wonder if we would just be better off with not flooding everything with chips. Does connecting your car to your phone really improve your life? I don't think it would improve mine. If anything, I'm trying to connect my phone to _less_ things than I used to because it just steals my attention from things that really matter.
Yes, every farmer in the US who is serious (that is no small hobby farmers). If the GPS is broken they won't bring the planter out in the field. Technology allows them to put exactly the right amount of seed in the ground at the right place. They saves thousands of dollars every year just by not planting too much. Then get tens of thousands more every year because the right amount of seeds results in more yield (profit) than either too much (plants have to fight each other for sun) or too little (bare ground doesn't produce a harvest).
Farmers are still figuring out to turn other data into profit, but they are learning that some soils just never will yield well no matter how much fertilizer they put on so they don't waste money on them, while others with a little extra fertilizer will yield more. The computer lets them easily adjust fertilizer levels for each small section of land.
Terms like "current political economy." Explaining everything, from poverty to environmental degradation, as a product of psycho-societal ideas like the "false idea of material abundance." It might work as a method of criticism, but I don't think it works the other way. We need to discover and develop new ways, and that doesn't tend to work from highly broad, abstract understandings down to the practical level.
I agree with most of the major touchpoints, but I think it could be written better.^ To hazard an inexact term, this needs to be far less ideological.
Take this paragraph:
We believe that new forms of cooperative and distributed property will emerge along these lines, a trend explained by Matt Cropp in his article, “The Coming Micro-Ownership Revolution.”6 Cropp’s article explains the direct link between P2P-driven declines in transaction costs and the shift to more distributed forms of ownership. The new corporate forms will no longer be based on shareholder-based ownership, but on common capital stock, held by the commoners themselves. These new entities constitute the “third commons” of “created materiality,” i.e., humankind’s productive machinery (in other words, capital), which joins the first two commons, the inherited material commons of nature and created “immaterial” cultural commons. The new forms of distributed individual property, which can be freely aggregated into collectives, emulate the free aggregation...
The author believes this because its a highly legible, direct application of the ideas and analysis. It has the disadvantage of being both limiting, and nonspecific. Hard to use as a formula, and easy to use for rejection.
I'm totally on board with OSS/Linux & Wikimedia as existence proofs. I would also add the WWW. OSS and its ecosystems are a rich set of smaller examples. I think lichess makes a great example, somewhat similar to wikimedia. Note that Jimmy Wales is more of a capitalist/libertarian, in his ideals. He would (I assume) be totally off put by this article's take. Thibault Duplessis, Lichess' founder, describes himself as a french communist. CVince Serf is just a dude. TimBL is more of a moderate pragmatist. Good look finding a take on "contemporary capitalism" that appeals to all three.
Why carry all this unnecessary baggage.
^More practical, convincing to the unconvinced, more room to graft on other ideas, less combative, less offensive to pre-xistsing political identities....
So given the choice between a $50k tractor which cannot be repaired unless you pay a lot of money and an easy to repair $100k tractor, both farmers and manufacturers will chose the first option. Of course, farmers want an easy to repair $50k tractor, but manufacturers have to make money. And manufacturers want to sell $100k expensive-to-maintain tractors, but competition won't let them.
The system we have now, with all its flaws, is one that suits people the most. We can make laws when the free market doesn't work, for example, we could make $50k unmaintainable tractors illegal, which I think would be great, but it will piss off farmers who will need to pay $100k for their tractors and it will piss off manufacturers who will lose their steady income.
> Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system.
No need to imagine, we have China, and before that, we had USSR. Not perfect examples, especially for China, but these are the real world alternatives to capitalism.
I'm not saying communism is the answer, but a free market where your choices are a crappy "cheap" product or an acceptable product for twice the price isn't something to be proud of. Oh, the market will solve the problem. Well this is what the market has produced, so that means this is the best possible option. It's like some kind of religion. If this is what the market has decided, then it must be the best thing and we have no right to question it.
The free market is actually a science, and the "invisible hand of the market" is formalized by game theory. And it often result in optimal solutions, but not always. The prisoner's dilemma is the best-known counter-example. There is mathematical proof that a free market is not perfect, but currently, in practice and when supplemented by relatively light regulation, that's the best we have.
As for the choice, you can't have good and cheap, it is not about being proud of something, it is just how things are. Legislation can just remove the choice. For example, you are not allowed to buy a car so cheap that it is going to kill you and the environment, which is a good thing. But because of that, you are forced to pay "twice the price", you just don't notice it because the cheap option is simply not available.
You continue to argue that because this is what the market has come up with, there is no better way to do it. You can absolutely, as suggested in the article, make it illegal to make it either illegal to do your own repairs or impossible without purchasing certain software or licenses. But because the market hasn't decided that and it's a form of regulation, then it must not be a good solution. I'm sure there are plenty of unintended consequences to legislation like this, but the consequence of no regulation is a situation where you can't repair your own equipment and the dealership can charge however much they want for the repairs, as you have no recourse.
Apple.
There's probably some restriction on reverse engineering it, but for a relatively low volume market with difficult to manufacture hardware parts, there's not going to be all that much interest in overcoming DRM even if there weren't laws.
All of this decrease the useful lifetime of equipment.
And no, all of this is not required, a trucked was able to pass California regulations with an old pre-EPA-regulations diesel engine, but the tolerances are a lot tighter (ie. forget about that chinesium oil pump with a couple thousands too much shaft end play), maintenance is a lot trickier...
http://belarus-tractor.com/en/company/news/2016/rare-soviet-...
1. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Main_Page
2. https://youtu.be/hl7lZZP21c8 | Open Building Institute - Introductory Video
3. https://www.youtube.com/user/marcinose/playlists | Marcin Jakubowski
4. https://youtu.be/S63Cy64p2lQ | Civilization starter kit | Marcin Jakubowski | TEDxKC
The primary reason the software is there is for vendor lock-in and rent seeking.
The problem isn't providing replacement parts. I think the issue is that locking their customers in their maintenance services is part of their business model.
Most likely the lifetime of service (decades) wouldn't easily be fitted into the margin of a specific model.
Essentially, you can't just look at the one product in isolation and think "this should exist from a competitor", as if anyone could easily make a company to go out and do it... you instead have to consider the ecosystem of companies and the numerous barriers to entry (such as patents and limited supply lines and the enormous R&D costs) and what the incentives in the market are, and it turns out that, if your product is one where the competition is already scarce--Apple + Samsung make up 80% of the mobile phone market, with the rest likely targeting people who don't have enough money to pay for high-end phones; there is a similar thing going on with tractors, with five companies controlling >70% of the market, and AFAIK mostly now selling locked down machines--you can't just expect to magically find a competitor pop up that is going to fill this particular interest. If you manage to circumnavigate all of the hurdles to build a phone that works as well as an Apple or a Samsung device, you are almost certainly going to join the oligopoly and lock your device down also, as the incentives are just too poor otherwise. The only fix for this is regulation and, to the extent to which regulation actually already exists here, legal precedent.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, we had a bunch of old farm equipment, some from like the 1930s-era. Mostly a lot of stuff from the 60s and 70s.
And like every bit of equipment on the place had special operation rules.
"Don't run that tractor past 5k RPMs" or "Don't use the PTO Shaft (Power Take Off, the gear in the back that hooks in to power towed equipment) from Tractor A with Equipment Item B since it'll blow out." "Remember Tractor J is Brand X, but it has an engine from Brand Z, and a PTO shaft from Brand Y..."
Point being, like every piece of equipment was rigged together with duct tape. It's horrible unsafe. When you buy used equipment, nothing comes written down... like you try it, break it, and duct tape it all back together again.
Parts from Brand Y in Engine X -- because that's what the implement had in stock when you needed to repair something. Lots of home-welds, lots of splice jobs. Need a new hose? Grab one off a car... it's not rated for the tractor, but it sort of fits... and it lets you get the job done today... so cool, "works" and then likely just forget about it until it breaks.
So how on earth could John Deere be liable for the performance or safety of their equipment? If a John Deere tractor blows up, or more aptly some part suffers catastrophic failure and hurts someone... who's at fault? Does John Deere have to honor a 10-year warranty, if you cut corners on the repairs?
And, in the case of accidents, even if it's the farmer who is at, the brand suffers from the news report, "A farmer father of 7 was killed today when his John Deere tractor malfunctioned..." Left out of the story is the fact that the farmer didn't repair it to spec, or the guy the farmer bought it from didn't repair it to spec...
Anyway I side with John Deere here. It's chaos not to lock this stuff down. Who owns liability? These things are used hard, they break frequently -- especially with age. How to you know something actually works right if you don't lock down the repair process?
This gets to a very interesting question when it comes to industrial equipment (which farm equipment falls under). Unless there is *VERY CLEAR* instructions not to do it, and the manufacturer made an effort to prevent it, the manufacturer is nearly always liable. (slide 14 https://www.slideserve.com/butch/product-liability-law-in-th... and also note slide 54 with respect to the liability - the video presentation of this slide deck is at https://youtu.be/NdN577BbnSY )
Additionally. as you noted, the news that {Brand} equipment broke and killed someone travels much faster and does more impact than the later findings that {Brand} was not at fault because the owner had removed the safety equipment from it.
If you lease it with a calendar time instead, it would make it uneconomical for either JD (in the case of multiple farms sharing the same equipment and logging #x times more hours on the equipment) or for smaller operators (where JD prices it for the 'its running 7 days a week' when its only running 1 day a week).
It would also be necessary to make sure that there's no way to circumvent that running time clock on the devices with 3rd party software.
Perhaps we should push beyond merely protecting the right to repair, but figuring out how to incentivize standardization and open protocols.
Because yeah, that's what you do when you recoup the rest of the cost in the subscription/maintenance.
It's the same model that game consoles use to keep the hardware costs low. They make it up in the game and peripheral licensing fees.
If JD dropped the subscriptions, but instead charged full price for the tractors, people would just scream about the prices instead.
I actually agree that farmers should legally be able to repair their own tractors, or have anyone else do it. But gaining that "right" back wouldn't actually fix their complaints, just shift them.
Look at the actual manufacturers, realise that noone is producing simple tractors any more, where are they going to come from?
As a single example, there's nothing that Belarus make that I'd want to use for buckraking a heap of any real size. They don't have a JCB 435S equivalent, or a heavier Fendt or Claas.
They're great tools, but you're not going to get the hectares per hour of sowing or harvest or the movement of tonnage of the modern competitors.
The new tractors contain computers and need tools. Manufacturers refuse to sell tools and placed equivalent of DRM on computers to stop you repairing your tractor on purpose. They make their supplirs sign contracts where the supplier is not allowed to sell parts to anyone else. None of these issues are due to complexity, all of them about you loose property rights over your possessions and turning physical goods into a subscribtion model
And imagine you have a warranty dispute or similar
But no manufacturer wants to do it. And no venture capital wants to finance such thing. Because.. I guess.. these evil capitalists just don't want to make more money.
Is that the argument? That capitalists don't want to make more money?
So no, the argument isn't that they don't want to make money. The argument is that they do, and realize that tacitly colluding will make them more money than undercutting each-other.
What they don't mention is that manufacturers protect their electronic gear i.e. the consoles inside the machine that use GPS to run a field, adjust the attachment acccording to various sensors etc. This is very sophisticated stuff, and farmers need and want this functionality.
Farmers aren't wanting their old 1950s-era tractors back. They want more control over the software -- and in particular don't want to pay for it. And while as an open source type myself I'm sympathetic to this, I'm suspicious about the outright bullshit in articles like this.
It’s one thing to say oh only the new stuff is locked down, but every part of the vehicle is, something that wasn’t the case a short while ago. In fact they’re digitizing controls and simple mechanical functionality that doesnt need to be digitized so they can abuse their maintenance monopoly.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the problem, also, a false statement in most cases.
People would like to have the option to choose who, when, where and how repairs their stuff. If the only option is the manufacturer - even after the warranty period -, then that's called a monopoly and is guaranteed to result in lower standards and higher prices and reduced availability.
It is one thing to have such a problem with a laptop or a mobile, because those are relatively cheap items that are easy to replace. But if you have equipment that your livelihood depends on worth tens of thousands of dollars, then this is completely unacceptable.
These farmers do not have to buy John Deere. If they don't like being tied in, they shouldn't have bought the equipment in the first place and chosen a rival then one of two things happen 1) John Deere realise they have been caught with their pants down and change their policy to win customers back 2) Farmers realise there is a new normal where the equipment is simply too complicated to allow them to tinker with it (or at least without losing any manufacturers guarantee).
If the only entity who can repair the kit is the one who sells new kit too, this is even worse than a standard monopoly argument. At least a normal monopoly has an incentive to serve you at the end of the day.
Let's be clear, it is pretty obvious that the whole tractor-as-a-service paradigm is extremely profitable. However allowing access to diagnostics/config/firmware for anything that controls heavy machinery can be a huge liability.
You are a misconfiguration away from a work accident with injury or death.
I would want a clear law that prevents the company from being liable.
So you don't trust the courts to enforce a contract? That's basically what a liability waver is, a bog standard contract that amends a prior (often implied by legal convention or state law) contract between the manufacturer and the product owner.
>When the public opinion wants someone to pay, the government will go after whoever can pay
FYI making one or both entities "governmental" doesn't do anything to change this.
https://recmanagement.com/feature_print.php?fid=200611GC03
> FYI making one or both entities "governmental" doesn't do anything to change this.
I do not know what this means, but my point is that if one of the parties in the dispute is politically disliked, then they may not get a fair shake.
In the context of this discussion, I can see “not having to deal with risks of liability waivers” as a supporting reason for why a company would want to lock down their devices or prevent people from tinkering with them. Then they can simply tell anyone coming after them that their product was clearly not meant to be tampered with and so tampering with it removed them from any liability.
Actual config/ROM changes are still heavily protected by manufacturers and are limited to authorized dealers.
A manufacturer can obviously do it. However, if that was allowed in the field, you would likely have whiplash injuries at best or fatalities at worse.
My point is some things are 'open' in some popular vehicles for which people have reverse engineered stuff.
But there is no liability interest from manufacturers in having this sort of thing in user space.
So what? A PC is very sophisticated as well but no matter which parts I put together, it works. You can abstract the sophisticated stuff away.. This is just a bad excuse IMHO
Yes, we know decisions aren't free. But it's not a coincidence that businesses are all simultaneously optimising in their own self interest and ignore the concrens of their customers.
Don't believe me? Go watch some farmers on Youtube and it won't take long to pick up the hatred for government interference. I don't know if it's selection or survivorship bias or what, but farmers really do not like being told what to do by someone else.