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.