The solution is a legal one, force the companies to provide the software required for you to use your hardware. It is stupid as a user you can only see a red light and only an "authorized dealer" can plug a laptop and see the exact problem and detailed diagnostics.

Without the law your open source software would be blocked by DRM and I am sure the companies would attempt to void your warranty if they can find you modified anything.

It's also about serial number encoded parts. The computer will only accept licensed ones it recognizes. Apple plays the same shitty game to keep you from replacing easy components yourself.

Louis Rossman has testified to Congress on the matter.

so does Raspberry Pi Foundation https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1088506051295567872

Why? Just to single source the camera?

Yes, to preserve the income from selling the cameras, to pay for the R&D.

What about proprietary PMIC? https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=238779#p1... MxL7704-R3/MxL7704-R4 are custom single client versions of the common chip, Apple does the same thing with Charger ICs.

Just speaking for myself, I'd rather pay a dollar or two more for an unencumbered Pi than have any restrictions on how I can use it.

Louis has been travelling the country to testify at various state legislatures. Its been fascinating following his efforts on youtube. here is a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2lsmovRO20_g...

These companies are also actively pushing "Renting" as a business model where the farmer only rents the tractor for the season. Any maintenance and repairs are done as part of the rental and at the end of the season, the tractor goes back. This completely cuts the farmer out of the equation in terms of ownership/repair.

Rent or buy, the issue is that if a harvester breaks down in the field it could be 3 ~4 days before a technician gets to the field, diagnoses and has to order a part, wait for said part and come back to your field to replace it. That machine being down for two weeks during harvest could mean the farmer losing a whole lot of money.

If you are someplace like rural Australia the closest tech might be 1000km away.. if they haven't installed the hacked firmware they can't even service them without a tech or the tractor shuts down.

Is there a specific piece of legislation to target? To get legal process need to have the people who’ve suffered damage be the claimants. I wonder if these farmers agree to arbitration instead of bringing a court case.

Look and see if there's any Right to Repair legislation on the docket for your local area, the naming is pretty consistent across the US right now.

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are the root cause as a special interest bill got abused even worse.

There is no sane reason to use government enforcement to stop people from tinkering with what they own. The only legitimate reason is an end state that is illegal for good reasons like removing a catalytic converter.

> BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't.

They absolutely did. Both depend on copyright. GNU licenses in particular were created in reaction to copyright protection being extended to computer programs as if they were literary works. Today, all of free and open source software directly depends on copyright in order to even be recognized as such.

This is very biased for the giant companies, you have laws to protect companies with copyright and anti hacking laws but when is time for protecting the normal people we can't modify or add a new law. I would be fine with no protection law but then I should be able to crack, pirate and reverse engineer software and hardware.

BSD didn’t need legislation but it did need a long legal process to resolve in its favor.

I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.

Unless you have proof (not just evidence) it remains q theory.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted half their budgets, 20% more farmers and construction companies would be out of business.

Right to Repair legislation goes 90% of the way to stopping the lockdown of the machine internals and codifies for everyone that once a machine is sold and in use, the manufacturer no longer has control over that machine.

> What stops farmers from slapping a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino with an array of sensors, GPS, modems and other electronics to "DIY" their tractors and other electronic/automated farm equipment?

There are a handful of farmers doing exactly that. Cost is a major hurdle though. Not so much the cost of the actual hardware (although sufficiently accurate and precise GPS units have only recently started to come down in price), but the opportunity cost of developing such systems. Time spent working on them is time spent away from the farm business. Spending time on improving agronomy and marketing could yield hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue vs. saving $50,000 on a commercial solution that will retain much of its value and can be resold later. It just doesn't make sense from a business perspective. Only those who see it as an exciting hobby will venture down that road.

In principle this is what investors are for.

There is known demand among farmers for repairable tractors, but it costs a moderate amount (more than an individual farmer has) to develop one. So you go raise some investment money to develop the software and then make it back by selling repairable tractors at a profit.

Maybe if you succeed you'll get copycats using your software on their own tractors, but by that point you've already succeeded. It may even help you by growing your ecosystem and making you more competitive against the closed incumbents.

In practice though, how easy is it to find an investment for an expensive venture you don't intend to directly profit from? Investors will want their returns, and they'll likely push for the same means the project was started to circumvent in the first place.

But you do intend to directly profit from it.

If you just start out selling tractors that are only equivalent to the incumbents and with all the same restrictions, who is going to buy them? The reason people want to buy from you instead of them is that it's possible to repair your tractors. And if people are buying from you, you're making money.

Maybe a few years later the investors decide they might like to make even more by closing things up, but by that point the software is already published for free on the internet (which was what got customers interested to begin with). So if they do all that happens is that someone else starts making repairable tractors, which people still prefer, using the software which is by then free and already exists.

Have people not noticed how much money Amazon makes out of "your margin is my opportunity"? Taking market share from the old guard by making less (but still some) profit per unit is a great way to make money.

For me the most interesting disruption is the low cost L1/L2 GPS such as Ardusimple combined with OpenAgGPS (https://github.com/farmerbriantee/AgOpenGPS) offers an alternative autosteer solutions that are currently add ons offered by manufacturers for $20 to 60k.

When working in large fields, most tractors aren't hand steered any more but still have an operator in the cab to keep an eye on the implement.

The libertarian tech monoculture is the problem, not the solution. If you knew the history of the industry or Kansas over the past 30 years you'd realize you're exactly backwards.

Deere and similar companies got the idea to create this "perfect walled garden monopoly tractor" from Steve Case. AOL was the first to really lay out the pattern so many other industries (and Google and Amazon and Apple and other monopolists) have now emulated.

This isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about consolidation, power and monopoly. There are lots of smart people trying to innovate in Kansas right now, for the most part they are getting absolutely crushed by massive corporate concentration.

What exactly is stopping these farmers from just buying from another vendor like New Holland or Kubota? Every time I read this stuff, it's all about John Deere being the Apple of farm equipment, and there's almost nothing said about their competitors, almost as if they don't exist.

I feel like I see the same thing when people I know complain about Apple: if I try to suggest they switch to Android because it doesn't have those problems, they look at me like I have a 3rd arm. I really wonder how much of this problem with farmers being unable to repair their own equipment is self-inflicted, by absolutely refusing to buy from a different vendor.

To my knowledge, Kubota doesn't produce harvesting equipment. And their largest agricultural tractor does have a lot of software (I assume it's closed source, haven't found anything to indicate otherwise).

As for running RPi or some other open-source or replacement control software, that's not a trivial thing to implement. Even if an entrepreneur releases a replacement control system, it's risky to install it (down time is expensive). Will they support the farmer? Will they be around in a year or two? Etc.

Did you ever notice that as you drive through farm country, you will see long stretches where everyone is using one brand, and then a long stretch where everyone is using another? Dollars-to-donuts it is driven by proximity to a regional parts depot. If you are down during planting or harvesting, and the mechanic can get you running today if you send your kid to a town 20 minutes away to pick up a part, or wait for tomorrows parts delivery, versus parts are two days away, it is an easy choice.

There's probably some level of acknowledgement that there will always be a subset of repairs requiring the dealer's expertise and tooling. Especially as the machines keep getting more complex.

So you will still buy the locally supported brand.

It's only because Deere is the biggest most well known face of the problem, and because they've been most aggressive baout locking things down.

It's not just their tactic, but stopping them sets the precedent.

Also most news outlets don't have bandwidth for multiple articles about all the other companies doing the same thing, so they are the placeholder for the topic.

Even if one of the other manufacturers in the space doesn't permit an easy self-repair path at the moment, it would seem to be a golden opportunity to expand their market by doing so.

Given the way capitalism works in the US now, though, if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.

IMO, the government should be putting a stop to this sort of thing. If you're on this site, then you've seen this happen scores of times in the tech space. But, again, a lot of people on this site are specifically hoping for a buyout like this to make their first couple hundred million, so this is a weird place to complain about a tech monopoly in tractors.

>if someone like Kubota broke out of the pack by doing something like this, something tells me that Deere would find the money to buy them out, and spike the idea.

Kubota is a Japanese company; Deere can't just buy them out on a whim. The Japanese government would most likely block it.