Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere | Hacker News Reader

Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere

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59 pointsrevorad37 comments

We've gotten to the point that in the future at the coffee shop you're going to have farmers asking each other, have you jailbroken your new John Deere?

> Linux

Hello GPL violation.

Surely John Deere are releasing source code to farmers and giving them the build instructions and install instructions needed to update the code on the tractors? /s

If the Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio, this means that farmers across America will be able to sue John Deere for GPL compliance.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/vizio.html

Assuming John Deere suddenly complies with the GPL, then what? The kernel source code is a tiny fraction of the actual software that makes up the entire product, and as far as I know no where does the GPLv2 require you to provide build instructions, let alone a way to flash new software?

You're right that most of what makes Deere tractors useful is probably proprietary, but once the base layer is open source, modifiable and reinstallable, then you can start building open source components on top that do everything else. We saw that with routers, the OpenWRT distro started out as a bunch of basic low-level code from a GPL compliance case and now there is a full-featured comprehensive web interface and a full OS for routers that is open source and runs on a variety of hardware.

https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/firmware-liber...

It is a common misconception that GPLv2 doesn't have build/install requirements, GPLv2 does actually require users to be able to both rebuild and reinstall the GPLv2 parts.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/mar/25/install-gplv2/ https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2021/jul/23/tivoization-and-t... https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...

It's the year 2022 and we're sideloading tractors.

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