Interview with John Deere user [video] | Hacker News Reader

Interview with John Deere user [video]

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I figured it was pretty obvious that since John Deere "agreed", this is more of a "negotiated" (or attempt) compromise to retain as much value for them as possible. Basically, by getting in on the story, they get to participate in the control of the narrative.

I'd have been more encouraged if I had been reading headlines like "John Deere forced to..."

I would link to an article, but Louis Rossmann only posts videos. He is the foremost authority in terms of Right To Repair, and it's worth watching the video, as there's no better source for this information.

I don't know if this is any better but if you prefer reading: https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=7-RgOUT3zeo

I hope the letter that Jared Wilson wrote the farm bureau gets published somewhere at some point, it'll be a good read! I asked if he had anything I could link to, he's not a journalist, just a really well spoken farmer.

haha sup louis, i took your advice from a few months ago and sought therapy. i'm a better man now!

just kidding, i didn't seek therapy. i'm neither better nor worse - just kinda middling it out

I wonder what would happen if US farmers protested like Dutch or French farmer do. Granted, geography makes those protests easier in individual European countries than the US.

> I wonder what would happen if US farmers protested like Dutch or French farmer do. Granted, geography makes those protests easier in individual European countries than the US.

It depends on political affiliation of farmers. If rightwing, same thing as ranchers occupying some federal wildlife refuge. If leftwing, occupy wall Street/water protectors.

For some reason right wingers are treated with kids gloves. Example, Jan 6 being arrested after the fact and not six feet under for assaulting most important building in America. Didn't policeman were afraid for their lives, like when they seen a child with a toy gun?

Are John Deere's products that much better than their competitors? Why would farmers willingly put up with this if alternatives existed?

Supposedly, JD has the easiest and best financing:

> JD makes it incredibly easy to finance equipment, which I doubt a competitor could do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34312192

How hard would it be to build an open source tractor? Pipe-dream or would "Tux Tractors" actually be a doable thing?

It'd probably be hard to source parts and equipment - I think farmers are likely to be restricted by emissions regulations/requirements - wouldn't be easy to put a school bus engine into a tractor without some serious carbon/emissions capture, etc. (as an example)

I seem to recall (though can't be 100% sure) that farmers are eligible for certain subsidies based on their emissions, etc. - basically shoehorning you into buying these expensive tractors/equipment as they're the only companies that can afford to follow those emissions standards - it sucks for farmers, but I can understand the benefit to the planet.

School buses have pretty common diesel engines similar to what are used in farm tractors. For larger tractors I suspect the engines are more similar to those used in 18-wheeler trucks and are merely scaled up versions of the Cummins, Cat, or Detroit diesel engines. Perhaps the right question to ask isn't about the whole tractor being open spec but the engine as that's likely one thing a start-up tractor maker would have someone else build for them rather than doing it themselves.

Sorry, but: you shouldn't be imagining that stuff. Your competences as a programmer are nowhere near building farm tractors - there's nothing within your experience you can base this on.

The concept of fungible modules can apply to both tractors and enterprise software. Engines from Cummins, Cat, Detroit, Mercedes, etc; electrical systems from Bosch, Panasonic, Raytheon, or Seimens... just like we can swap email sending engines or cloud hosting providers. It's the details of completing the design and assembly of the tractor where I would go back to a dark cubicle and work on the open source ECM software.

Not that hard, but it wouldn't have anywhere near the capabilities of modern combines and tractors.

If you wanted to build an "open source", state of the art circa 1970, should be totally doable. Modern tractors are kind of absurd - they are basically teleinformatic devices with an engine and attachments. All the problems of modern cars and modern industrial machines (e.g. CNC milling machine), combined.

It's a bit like the change in telephony over the period - anyone with a soldering iron, machine tools and some knowhow could build a rotary phone on their own, but imagine trying to even assemble the components of an iPhone at home.

Yep. I used to work for a company that provided HW & SW development services to an agricultural implement manufacturer -- the stuff that is towed by tractors. It wasn't unusual for some weird "happens only once in every 100 starts of the system" glitches to pop up that required hours in the field with diagnostic equipment trying to troubleshoot the thing. Cuz, of course it only happened on the tractor, not back in the lab! And then, "it only happens with this particular type of tablet or version of Android" to boot!

The complexity is thus: imagine you are presented with a 2020 laptop running on a chinese SoC, and you want to implement linux from ground up - empty repository. linux does not exist, and none of the hardware is described anywhere, there is no open source or easily hackable code out there for operating any of the hardware peripherals, nothing follows any standards.

Also the laptop is actually 15 laptops, networked, and each of them has about 20 peripherals connected to it, all of which have to work at all times, or the whole machine grounds to a halt and worst case scenario kills you and then explodes.

If that doesn't explain it's impossible, idk what can.

For a small one of < 50hp, not very difficult: a tractor is really just a very reliable engine (probably running well below spec), a transmission, a hydraulic pump and a frame to mount everything onto. People DIY tractors all the time.

For tractors the size that we're mostly concerned with in articles like this, no one who needs it would have the time!

It depends on what you want the tractor to do. Running the engine can be done using free software so that problem is solvable. It is all the extra functionality related to semi-autonomous control which need to be built to create a fully open "modern" tractor which would be the biggest hurdle. Those functions may not be essential for small-scale or "hobby" farmers but they are so for large-scale operations whether they be using contractors or keeping the work in-house.

So it would be solvable but who is going to do the work? Farmers tend to be risk-averse when it comes to equipment since they need it to work when needed - where "when" is often decided by external factors like crop and weather conditions, availability of supplies and help. When you're about to cut and bale hay you don't have time to tinker with your tractor since it has to be done before that cold front pulls in around 17.00 tonight...

Reposting my comment from when info about the MOU came out [2]

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Here's my analysis of what's going to happen if this goes through.

First, quote from the MOU [1]:

> AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regulation relating to issues covered by this MOU and/or "Right to Repair" is enacted, each of AFBF and Manufacturer reserve the right, upon fifteen (15) days written notice, to withdraw from this MOU.

It might play out like this:

1. Deere starts a half hearted parts process. They will provide some parts, there will be year long delays in roll out, it will be annoying to use, documentation will be made incomplete on purpose by leaving out random pages or drawings and there will be no way to get them to fix it.

2. Farmers are now locked into using this service for their existing deere equipment because anything else will bankrupt them. Those machines will remain in service for a good 10-20 years which is an important time frame, because

3. Deere will spin off a subsidiary or buy a competitor which will sell what used to be Deere branded technology, "under license". This "new company" will keep all the anti-repair technology in place. New products will primarily come from this company going forward, and the products will be priced so that actual Deere-branded products are not competitive any more, especially second-hand ones.

4. It is now 2028. The MOU cannot be broken because farmers still need parts for their "old" Deere products. Deere anti right to repair lives on in the artificial competitor, which now retains 90% market ownership. Farmers cannot argue for right to repair any more. They've been sold out. Everything has gone back to normal for at least the next 25 years, as far as Deere is concerned.

[1] https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_John_Deere_MOU.pdf [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34308334

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(end repost)

Looks like so far the JD user in the video agrees with what's happening, to the letter, even including parts lock-in. I didn't immediately conceive that JD's repair shops would threaten farmers who are politically active with withholding repairs, but I probably should have.

I have a group of friends who looked at the BBC article talking about this RTR MOU - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64206913 - and after reading it, were claiming confidently that it helped push forward right to repair in a good way - I actually spent the time to look at the MOU the article linked and knew right off the bat that it was a load of crap, only meant to extend an easily broken olive branch to farmers. (Right at the bottom, look who is signing the MOU - "SALES AND MARKETING VP" - gee, why isn't it a CEO, or the board of directors?)

It's cementing my personal opinion deeper and deeper within me that that the media is directly responsible for forming the viewpoints and ideas of a huge amount of people - and they're violating this responsibility in huge ways by having inexperienced/irresponsible journalists and journalism - not to mention the corporate and governmental meddling that's pervasive to journalisms core.

It's somehow become a foreign concept though it wasn't long ago that you could take your TV, vacuum, appliance, computer, small electronics, into repair shops and have experienced, knowledgeable people able to diagnose and repair problems quickly and efficiently. Sure, electronics have gotten more discrete, smaller, harder to replace without specialized tools... The concept is still the same despite what these massive corporations tell you.

Apple "supports" individuals by allowing them to pay for a massive/heavy shipments of tools, equipment, instructions, etc. to replace parts on your devices - when they could just provide easily available parts like chips, boards, screens, etc. to third-party repair shops (not "apple-authorized" that come with all kinds of riders and caveats). All so Apple can look at legislators who don't understand intent of laws and societal desires and say "Look, we're trying! We support RTR!"

John Deere is pulling the exact same thing - and the media is playing right along with it.

It's economically cheaper and more advantageous to go through all these motions to extend this fake peace offering to farmers and have the media convince everyone that it's 'actually really totally right to repair guys' while at the same time controlling absolutely everything in their supply chain so they make profit on their devices at every single corner of market capture - sales, repair, maintenance, customer retention (oh dang, it's too expensive to repair my tractor/phone because the part/board costs 40-50% of a new device, might as well buy a new one!)

It's a disgusting anti-consumer practice and it's only going to get worse.

The one good thing about inflation and consumer electronics being more expensive long-term is we might see legislation that forces companies to actually allow consumers to repair and maintain their devices, with access to parts, schematics diagrams, etc. etc. I somehow doubt it though.

I disagree about computer repair. Maybe it was different in the US, but in Europe, at no time were there easily accessible repair services for computers. Even with the most easily repaired ones - 8-bit computers - you always had to find some guru who was doing it out of sheer love for the machines rather than for money. Once things went into 16 bits they were too complicated for typical repair shops. Electronics repair shops really only ever focused on (CRT) TVs, radios / (cheap) hifi, mayyybe alarms or door openers, mayyyybe the electronics (only!) inside new-fangled electronic laundry machines (up until ~2000 most of them were mechanical, using clockwork mechanisms similar to old mechanical mains-shutoff timer plugs). It might be surprising from today's perspective but most EE's didn't really deal with computers and had no interest in them. They were more interested in analog electronics and many of them were merely glorified electricians. That said my uncle who taught me the basics of my C128 was an electrician, so there.

>It's cementing my personal opinion deeper and deeper within me that that the media is directly responsible for forming the viewpoints and ideas of a huge amount of people - and they're violating this responsibility in huge ways by having inexperienced/irresponsible journalists and journalism - not to mention the corporate and governmental meddling that's pervasive to journalisms core.

I would be fine with the author of the article not being informed on the topic if they had just reached out to some farmers to ask what they think before blindly publishing this as a win.

I'm not a farmer. I have no clue.

I get numbers of people who show up at the state legislature in Nebraska in 2017, Maryland 2020, NY 2015, and I call them all up when this comes out. Some will be open to speaking on the record, some not, and some will come on video.

Nobody has all the answers, and nobody has the time to research & become an expert on everything when covering so many different topics in a day. That's fine.

Not asking the direct stakeholders who are affected by this news what they think of it when writing these articles, is a giant misstep. It takes so little time to do.

I think there is a financial penalty to not being the first out with an article, so the incentive structure is to be the first out with the new news, rather than the most correct. The corrections will never do as well as the original piece, either. There was one thing I got wrong in 2018, because I didn't have access to the court records at the time. Once they were shared with me, I posted a correction in 3 separate videos, that, altogether, got less than 5% the viewership of the original piece. It's even worse for mainstream outlets that issue the correction as an asterisk or bury it, rather than as a centerpiece of their programming.

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