John Deere's ongoing GPL violations: What's next
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John Deere is a horrible company whose upper management needs to be wiped from the industry.
Why do people keep buying Samsung or Apple when there are better products? They certainly don't respect the right to repair either.
Likewise, people buy JD because it's a well-known brand.
If you asked people what they wanted 100 years ago, they would say they wanted a faster horse. It's hard to advocate for something that people don't realize they don't have.
Because most people don't care about the right to repair or are completely uniformed. Neither of which should apply to a professional farmer.
Many times, the products do not work, and repair is locked to approved equipment that is confirmed and authorized remotely - no authorization, no repair, no operational equipment.
The last Defcon conference shattered the control that the corporation is able to exercise over this equipment, because of bad security design. There is a major effort to rethink (and improve) this control, but everything on the market now is irretrievably broken from the perspective of the embedded electronics preventing unauthorized repairs.
There are other problems, one involving a fatality at a recent union strike, the GPL violations above, right to repair, and the (lack of) staff to correctly address said adversity.
It will be interesting to see what transpires.
Because there aren’t better products? Knowing nothing, I’d suspect the same of JD.
So from an economic pov: it's a market failure. From an individual's pov: because purchase is complex.
Regarding your last point: "Perhaps RTR just isn't as important to people as the tech crowd thinks."
I agree, and still think RTR is very important. For a comparison, take any public health issue. Are, for example, unhealthy foods popular? Very much so. Is it still worth it for the people to regulate it? Absolutely. Issues such as this are not well served by treating it as a popularity contest, because if it would be up to the children, all of the meals would be candy. Experts, who have much deeper insights into the workings of their area can give much better advice.
1) I have a farm.
2) I will lose millions a year if I don't have X.
3) X broke.
4) Only JD has anything that would prevent #2 (without collapsing the whole farm).
Buying JD is... pretty reasonable in that scenario. It's one of the reasons captured markets are so bad, it lets companies get away with a lot of things they couldn't if the market were actually fair and competitive.
For example: Why do people keep buying BP gas after they were responsible for one of the biggest environmental disasters in history? Maybe people don’t care about the environment?
The answer in all cases is that being a wealthy company with a lot of market penetration doesn’t mean your actions are ethically or morally right, or that your customers agree with them.
I guess the logical conclusion is that a company can be "bad" and yet still have people buy from them.
Edit: To be clear, I guess I'd just say your question is sort of illogical. I see no reason one should assume a company needs to be "good" for people to buy from it.
If the Farm Bureau is so bad, why doesn't JD simply leave the US market, instead of corrupting that bureau to their own ends?
If you're playing a game, and you think the only moves available are "buy" or "don't buy", while your opponent uses a plethora of other moves, you will lose, and lose bad.
2. The question was rhetorical. Nobody "wonders" anything in this conversation.
3. The extremist capitalist ideology espoused by many of HN's members is among the most harmful ideologies alive in our society today, and the mentally stable thing to do is treat it as the harmful ideology that it is. Consistently prioritizing corporate profits over basic human rights and decency is not healthy, and it's not healthy to treat it as if it were okay.
It's just that I find myself to also ask the exact same question GP asked. I don't know anything about farming, or JD or even if JD has a market dominant position. And it's interesting to wonder what we, as mostly-tech-focused people here in HN, are missing.
In the sense that, yes open source is great and being able to repair stuff is amazing. But farmers are probably really aware of the upsides of easy to repair hardware... so what are we missing? I just fundamentally tend to assume that people in other fields know a lot more about their stuff than I do, so it's important to ask what's the other side that we can't see here.
So I didn't necessarily took the GP as being some sort of gotcha question in this context (even though I'm usually pretty good at picking that up)
Sure, and it's a legitimate question. If the person I was responding to had merely asked a question, I wouldn't have posted what I did. But, he followed up with a statement which showed the question was rhetorical.
Since it seems like you're genuinely curious, I'll offer what insight I have (which isn't much). I'm not a farmer but I've lived around farmers and get my food from community-supported agriculture (CSAs) wherever possible, which puts me in direct contact with farmers a lot, and we talk.
In a lot of areas, John Deere is the only company with local distribution, meaning that if you want to buy a new tractor, you have to either buy John Deere or pay for delivery. The new alternatives are not particularly good, either, since economies of scale force them to either charge more, or cut quality to cut cost. Kubota, for example, is one of the few alternatives with wide distribution, but are known for quality issues.
The alternative which most smaller-scale farmers seem to prefer is actually buying used, but that preference is reflected in the price: good-condition used tractors from the 80s or earlier run for about 3x the price of equivalent new tractors. Most of these old machines were overbuilt and therefore don't break down often if maintained well, but when they do break down, parts aren't available and mechanics don't know how to work on them. The CSA I went to in upstate NY had a farmer on staff who knew how to work on their two tractors--and pretty much only those two. And building a patchwork tractor fleet out of various different used tractors obviously scales poorly.
Tractors are possibly the least complicated machines John Deere sells, and for many of the products they sell, such as tillers, planters, etc., they have no large-scale competition, and some of these machines didn't exist 40 years ago, at least not in their modern forms. With the exception of a pull-behind tiller, the CSAs I've been to don't have this equipment, instead doing this labor by hand. Part of the reasoning behind this is that it's more sustainable, but I suspect that's at least partly putting a positive spin on being priced out. Modern versions of these complicated machines are more reliable than older versions because they coordinate the complicated interactions digitally (no moving parts involved in coordination) rather than mechanically. This digital control is precisely where John Deere is violating the GPL and people's right to repair.
Finally, some farmers are locked in by inertia: they bought and trusted John Deere for generations before John Deere started using software monopolistically, and didn't experience any of the problems until their newest equipment started breaking down, which might have only happened recently.
In general, part of the fallacy of anarcho-capitalism is that unregulated competition is stable: eventually one competitor becomes dominant and can use that position to no longer have to compete on serving the customer's needs. That's where John Deere is, and they'll continue to behave monopolistically as long as they are allowed to. True capitalism requires a strong central authority to prevent anti-competitive practices through regulation. If anarcho-capitalists really believe that unregulated capitalism results in the best results for consumers, then they should have no problem with regulating in favor of consumers, since it's just making rules that companies have to do what they're going to do anyway.
In highschool, I worked a couple seasons picking tobacco. Farmers love to be able to repair their tractors. Repair and maintenance work is something that can also give them something to do over the winter when they are not working the fields much if they limp along until then. Most farmers purchase them because as mentioned, there isn't really a reasonable alternative in the event it is something that actually does need to "go into the shop." I also would not be surprised if most of JD's sales were from corporate farms and smalls farmers are still using their grand daddy's tractor. The farm I worked on, the farmer was still using a 50 year old international harvester. Doing all of his own maintenance and repair work.
I think that means that a lot of people think that RTR is super important and you are wrong. But you can't be wrong because you didn't make a statement. You asked a question. And it is an important question. People assume your position on the question just because you asked it. This is a serious mistake.
RTR fans cannot solve the problem until they can unravel the answers to this question.
One obvious answer to the question is that there are very few alternatives to JD. How do we solve that? Well, lots and lots of money. How do we come up with lots of money?
Um.. sell an alternative to JD? Ok, not practical on day one. Sell an alternative to Kubota? Hmmm... difficult. But that's probably where it needs to start. So, raise a lot of money to build an alternative to Kubota? Hmm.. if only there was some place where somebody could go where they gave away many millions of money to risky startups.
I don't have millions of money, but I have approached a few efforts I hoped could go somewhere. No luck so far. The opportunity is there for the right somebody to run with. Perhaps starting with riding mowers could lead to something. It might take longer, but sooner started sooner done.
John Deere isn't evil because the people in charge decided, one day, to start twirling their moustaches. We can assume the issue is systematic. Would a startup be insulated from the same pressures and incentives that created – or permitted – John Deere?
Questions like that led to the GPL. They have led to other innovations as well. Yes, some people are always trying to figure a way around GPL and around every other well-intentioned thing. But still, BSD, MIT, MPL, and lots of other efforts have allowed the world to have and preserve some amazing things. And we need to keep asking those questions and keep coming up with spectacular answers.
Every great answer allows us to iterate better and better on what this world can be. Every great answer starts with a great question.
"Justice delayed, is justice denied " is supposed to be one of the principles of jurisprudence, it seems to have been forgotten
These cases take years
In other parts of the (in)justice system people languish in jail, and on bail, waiting for their day in court.
The legal systems of Western "democracies " have become a money fountain, and are loosing the sense of justice
EDIT: I dug into it a little. SFC appears to be dug into a lawsuit against Vizio. It makes sense, even law firms have finite resources, and there’s some indication that the outcome of this lawsuit could give a clearer indication of the viability of a suit against John Deere. My original point on the time it takes to file a suit stands though.
Correct. Closing out the suit takes years. As was said:
> These cases take years
If you sue in a court of law, they will give you money damages, and maybe an injunction specifically requiring the developer delete their copy of the program. Under no circumstances will a court demand specific performance of GPL obligations to release source code. But that's what the SFC wants. So the only way to get people to comply with the GPL is to use the threat of a lawsuit to encourage compliance.
This is contrary to what we normally think of with copyright litigation, but that's mostly because the lawsuits we see are either breakdowns of negotiation, or against individual infringers and pirate sites that would never be granted a license under any circumstances whatsoever. When you want a licensee to actually do something, you are better off threatening litigation and negotiating rather than going straight to the nuclear option.
[0] Nobody told that to the Lawnmower Man[1] unfortunately
[1] Larry Ellison
I found the latest Conservancy lawsuit interesting, they are suing as a third-party beneficiary of the GPL (ie as a recipient of GPL code), not as a copyright holder. They are suing solely for compliance, not for damages. Hopefully they get back their costs too though.
I wonder why not though. If that’s the clear terms of the license, and there’s some implied consent when using a library, and others knowingly used the library with the right terms, why can’t the courts find it fair?
Basically, Atari wanted to port some old Humongous Entertainment games to Wii, they hired a contractor, who hired a contractor, who downloaded SCUMMVM and ported it to the Wii. Of course, Nintendo's SDK terms specifically forbid source code disclosure, and they did not disclose source code of their port of this emulator.
So if a court specifically compelled performance of the GPL's license obligations, then they'd also be compelling Atari to violate their agreement with Nintendo. So does Nintendo now get to sue Atari for being sued by SCUMMVM's development team and losing? Or does the court get to override Nintendo's NDAs to satisfy the GPL? What if they chose the opposite: overriding the GPL to preserve Nintendo's NDAs? Neither of those outcomes really jive with the core idea of copyright, because they all rely on having one infringed party "step on" the other's ownership, with courts having to decide who wins and loses.
So that's 15 months for a slam-dunk injunction. Today it wouldn't take as long since there's case law backing them up. But if the RIAA had spent 2 years sending emails and writing blog posts, they wouldn't have gotten anywhere either.
The other end of the spectrum might be an outcome like "Some GPL library authors find themselves suddenly owning a major farming machinery company". :)
The US copyright law is draconian, copyright violations are felony violations with 10 years prison and 100k$ fines, the Aaron Swartz taught us that.
Turns out you are spot on!
"The first-generation Ford Mustang was manufactured by Ford from March 1964 until 1973."
So now I am not old, I am Mustang old!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Mustang_(first_generation...
law dictates that parts must be made for any automobile for 10 years after that specific model year stops being manufactured. that's it. law does not say that the parts must be made in sufficient quantity, nor does it limit pricing of the parts, but the parts must be made and be made available to consumers for 10 years.
10 years is all you get, and at the rate of the continued advancement of safety features, I would not want to be driving anything more than 10 years old at any time. That Mustang will gladly pierce your heart and sever your spine with its steering column in a 30Mph head-on collision.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/31761/enormous-costs-of-new-tr...
"A lot more farmers, in fact. Enough to drive up the price of something like an 800-hour 1979 John Deere 4640 to over $60,000 at a Minnesota auction last August, which is more than double the price a well-worn example would fetch, but still a bargain compared to a new $150,000 rig. (Tractors' lives are measured in hours of operation, not miles, with the average hard-working farm tractor logging around 500 hours per year.) Imagine buying a '79 Pontiac Trans Am with 20,000 miles on it, and you get the picture. The difference is, no farmer is paying that much for a low-hour tractor from the Carter Administration without planning on using it day in and day out until it breaks—then fixing it on their own, on the cheap."
The display is a full blown touchscreen GUI built using Linux and all sorts of OSS tools. The LTE gateway is another linux machine.
The normal interpretation is that it includes Configure scripts, Makefiles etc. The SFC claim it also requires things like the encryption keys needed to load the software on that specific device.
As most people are aware, GPLv3 added explicit requirement for such keys.
The SFC claims that the GPLv2 always required the ability to install modofied software on the device that shipped with GPL (except in cases like ROM, where nobody can modify), and what the GPLv3 is about prohibiting device makers from making their proprietary software stop working when users install modified versions of GPL'd software.
I have also heard of at least one other party that asked Stallman flat out if GPLv3 allowed for providing keys that allow for installation of modified versions of the free software software, but where use of such keys bricked the proprietary software that came with the device. Stallman allegedly indicated that it was, which if true counters the SFC narrative.
https://events19.linuxfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017...
> [so], these words in GPLv3: “The information must suffice to ensure that the continued functioning of the modified object code is in no case prevented or interfered with solely because modification has been made.” mean that the proprietary software that is not a combined work with the GPLv3'd work must also function?
> Stallman replied on 2012-05-06 with:
> Absolutely. And I wrote it specifically to do that!
https://www.hagerty.com/media/news/john-deere-loses-battle-i...
As someone who uses Linux every day this hurts and makes me wonder what the future will be as hardware gets locked away from us with the very tools we made to use it.
I want to make a product, I don't even mind giving away the code. I'm just worried since its an embedded system, its hard to update or whatever. As many times as I read the legal stuff, its over my head. I can't understand how you can let someone update part of the code on something compiled. Its not like I'm going to have a screen on my device to let users read the code either.
If someone wants to fight a legal battle, its really due to my incompetence, not malice.
For GPLv3, it's that simple most of the time. You talk about embedded which suggests you may be thinking primarily of the "tivoization" clauses designed to prevent user lockout. Again, if you're a fully open source project this will be hard to fail because the user should be able to just copy whatever you do in development. It's when you try to prevent user updates while allowing your own that this applies.
You could read 6(b) to mean that you have to offer consumers the choice between physical-delivery-at-cost and for-free-download of the source... but I don't think that's the right reading.
OTOH, the internet is a "medium customarily used for software interchange" so maybe that would be fine, but the internet wouldn't "accompany" the device. Also, in GPLv2 you are allowed to just send a note "you can get source from us delivered on a storage device for $X", so if you do the purchase thing, plus write a note with every device about how to get the code on the internet or on disk, you should be fine.
https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/principles.htm...
You can provide your closed source part as a precompiled library or object file together with the source code for the LGPL part and build scripts that let the recipient relink it with a (possibly modified version of) the LGPL code to generate a new final binary.
A pain yes but not impossible. Having a screen or not is irrelevant, nothing says the recipient has to access the source on the same device as the binaries run.
This is also my understanding of why the AGPL was created to try to close the loophole of running GPL code on the backend; since running code on a server doesn't entail distributing the server binary to people who access the service, the GPL didn't enforce any requirements on sharing any modifications to code that was modified and used as part of the backend for the service. Some felt that this went against the spirit of the GPL, so a new license that made this also explicitly disallowed was created.
As for the LGPL, my recollection is that it differs from the GPL in creating an exception for dynamically linking to the compiled binary; the phrasing of the (non-L) GPL requires that any "derivative works" of the GPL-licensed product (I can't remember if that's the exact term, but it's a something similarly general) must abide by the GPL, which could be interpreted as applying to something that dynamically links to a library licensed under the GPL. Licensing something under the LGPL gives permission for users to dynamically link to your product without requiring them to share the code linking to it.
Edit: It's remarkable to see a raft of uninformed comments here. What's up with that? Once most people in HN knew the story of Linux, Gnu and so forth.
I am Austrian and I am a bit confused...
A related thing is: look through places where the crowd skews young/newb like r/programmerhumor. You'll see arguments, discussions, etc about things that might make you think "I thought that was settled ages ago" but in reality were just things you got experienced perspective on, and/or grew out of.
People grow and change - usually in a slow and steady way that's hard to see in the mirror. I suspect you've picked up a lot of knowledge and some new perspectives - a few years is a long time!
As of yet there is no case to win or lose.
I found a page talking about how they won’t enforce their trademark against people who use it, but this is not the same as not enforcing copyright.
Thanks in advance!
SFC wants to use the law as a stick, while trying to get people to comply with out legal action. Many core members prefer to not even engage with the threat of legal action at all, they believe that simply asking nicely will get companies like VmWare to comply. of course this is rarely true but.....
[1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/drive...
[2] http://kroah.com/log/blog/2017/10/16/linux-kernel-community-...
[3] http://kroah.com/log/blog/2017/10/16/linux-kernel-community-...
After looking into this and reading your three links, I couldn’t find a conclusive answer to my follow up question, so maybe you know: did the Linux Foundation ever serve a legal purpose of pursuing copyright violations and take point in defending the copyright holders that contributed to the Linux Kernel?
Near as I can tell, it appears to be largely up to individual copyright holders.
Even that agreement seems to be an article of trust from individuals saying they’ll abide by the extra paragraphs and not doggedly pursue copyright violations so long as violators act in good faith about taking corrective action in a timely manner.
i am not aware of any legal action the Linux foundation, or anyone in the leadership of said has participated in, in a few instances, like the one that lead to the Enforcement Statement they have actively tried to kill the legal action.
The Enforcement Statement is vague purposefully as to what "good faith", and purposefully never spells out when it is OK to move to the courts... because in their view that answer is never
I managed to filter through all the SCO and most of the non-Linux lawsuit stuff gumming up Google and near as I can tell, the only lawsuits involving copyright violations are or Linux specifically are pursued by individuals or agencies like SFC.
So given all that I would read this enforcement statement as a PR move more than a definite article, less “this list of people is effectively giving up their copyright” and more “so you know that one jackass? Well this lot undersigned here won’t be like him. Please don’t stop supporting and using Linux.”
Just as an aside, what constitutes “good faith” is something that can and usually is regardless of whatever contract or license is in effect litigated in court.
as a for-instance, in TFA it says this "issue that goes far beyond one person wanting to fix their printer software" which is a weird strawman-flex and seems more like a childish insult directed at Stallman's creative spark when he invented the software freedom movement in the first place 40ish years ago. Jelly much?
Honest question, why would they be divisive like this?
"Stop the sale of products that violate licenses in markets the US controls"
It seems Xiaomi is in good company ;)