Much of this is apparently are coming from EOL devices while also violating GPL. Shameful. Can't someone take action on this? The article references Sick Codes' talk at DEFCON, which was wonderfully done and highlights many serious issues here.
if their software is actually not a giant pile of crap they should be happy to compete on the market by letting other companies sell software for their shitty phone (or tractor in this case)
'tying' has been illegal like forever, shocking to me we allow it for hardware + software bundles
Farmers on other threads on this topic have stated that other vendors don't have the same repair network that John Deere has, and that being able to get timely repairs (often <24 hour) is often critical to their work due to the small time windows in which certain tasks (like harvesting) need to take place.
There are vendors with more basic equipment. But John Deere's selling point is the complex features they offer. I watched some farming YouTube videos and I was surprised by the technology in modern tractors. The tractors will drive by themselves and they'll keep track of what land they've already covered, help you align, let you control how many seeds you're planting per acre, etc. It's all very high tech and a single person in a single tractor can cover a massive area and their job is mostly just to supervise the tractor and make sure they don't run out of seed or whatever they're putting down.
Millenial Farmer on youtube illustrates this pretty great. I watched an entire year of videos from planting to harvest time and all that was involved tech-wise was pretty interesting...along with his frustrations with John Deere.
> too bad all the margin profits will end up into JDs pockets
The reason these tractors sell is they have positive ROI. That doesn’t justify the tying. But assuming they’re money losers will lead to poor decisions.
So saves me 1k a year? I don't think farmers are converting their equipment to John Deere for such a paltry improvement.
But if it does truly net me 90K additional profit (and thus the gross improvement is 179k, half of which is spent on the capital to make that improvement), then yes, that looks optimal.
of course there is. it's not hard to find a straightforward tractor that's easy for any third-party mechanic to do repairs on. that's basically kubota's whole sales pitch.
but Deeres are still popular. turns out that all the complicated software stuff is actually helpful, and some farmers want to buy it. even if a bunch of people on the internet who've never touched a tractor in real life think they shouldn't.
> if a bunch of people on the internet who've never touched a tractor in real life think they shouldn't.
Bunches of real working farmers agree as well. I've noticed that over time, I've been seeing fewer and fewer Deere tractors working the fields around here.
Kubota doesn't have the breadth of product that Deere does especially at the large end. Doosan kind of does under their various brands but they don't really compete that hard in the agricultural sector and I don't know if their repair parts and software ecosystem is more or less locked down than Deere.
Western countries don't trust China's computing hardware, for obvious reasons... why on Earth would they trust equipment that supports agricultural infrastructure?
Well, to be fair most of the drones used in agriculture are....DJI....
There is inherent distrust, but Deere and Case are close to pricing out/pissing enough customers. I am on the record they are sitting on the autonomous tractor tech (today) because the existing market they dominate is too lucrative. Could be their kodak moment playing out. We'll see.
I want this, my neighbour wants this, his neighbour - who runs an older, pre-proprietary John Deere wants this. Farmers need their tractors to work and anything that helps there is a boon. While ag contractors may run the latest most modern equipment farmers tend to have a few tractors themselves which tend to be a bit older, a bit more run-down than those shiny new JD/MF/NH/Valtra (in Sweden and Finland)/etc. machines. They can still do with some of the nicer parts of the electromagic on those machines.
So... once those JDs go out of support, who knows? There may be a market for an aftermarket control box, one which pulls the machine out of the clutches of the mothership and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of the farmer. I have a proposal, just donate one of those machines to me and I'll rig up such a box. Not that my current 1982 UTB640DTC (a Romanian license-built/copied (it is a bit unclear) Fiat 640 with FWA and a front loader) has given up but still...
So, good servicing is fine if you can afford it but many farmers tend to their own equipment as well in which case the availability of parts and protocol specifications really comes in handy. Mechanical parts - that what used to define a tractor - tend to be readily available but electronics and specifications are a different story.
I think you really hit the nail on the head there. In the brave new world of tractors that actually have (lots of) software in them, we need to make the right comparisons/analogies.
Saying "no farmer wants this" is the equivalent of saying that "no farmer wants the technical manual" for their pre-software-filled tractor. I bet it helps tremendously if you have the manual for your 1950 International Harvester Farmall MD and you want to keep repairing it. I have no idea how to repair tractors, nor do I own one or will probably ever own one but for some reason watching this was fun: https://youtu.be/7yuHIu1IfPw?list=PL-1mGLAjHPWy0BL-MO6MrSr-m... And somewhere in there (or maybe somewhere else on his channel) he shows these manuals, where to get them etc. Apparently even though some of the companies are out of business or no longer provide these themselves, there are re-prints of these and other companies that still make parts for these engines and tractors. The guy has a pretty small operation it seems and uses tractors mostly to make hay for his cattle but it looks like he's using that 72 year old MD as well as some other slightly (!) newer tractors to run his operation.
Farmers don't want an open source tractor protocol for its own sake, but if it allows for greater flexibility, reduced costs, and improved serviceability, then those will be relevant competitive advantages. You can see a similar phenomenon with linux on the desktop; Most people don't care about linux being open source in principle, but there is a meaningful, if small, amount of mainstream interest in it for reasons such as privacy and extending the lifespan of older hardware, both of which are enabled by linux's openness.
There is an open source tractor from the open source ecology project. From the videos it seems to be functional, however I guess for most farmers this would be a no go option.
There’s the Indian Mahindra which is advanced but still basic. I’ve seen a lot of them in the Midwest. Their tractor is the best selling farm tractor in the world.
Does a high-margin spur on a third party service? I've thought about what that would take, I imagine you'd have to weather some pretty serious lawsuits but maybe if you had some backing it would be doable?
You'd need enough backing to fend off a company that earned almost $40B in revenue in 2020 from an attempt to capture one of its fastest-growing revenue streams. Good luck finding a serious investor that would be willing to try it.
What kind of legal fight would you be up against? If John Deere wanted to put up lets say 100 million to fight, what kind of money would need to be put up to defend, if its lets say 10 million or less, then maybe that's worth it if the market is 4000 million.
The problem is probably in risk vs reward. You have to succeed in at least one lawsuit against John Deere (other countries may have different laws, and thus more lawsuits), and then you have to convince people to buy your third party stuff rather than OEM stuff.
Then on top of that, you have to pray that John Deere doesn't successfully lobby for a law banning your software, or find a way to prevent your software working (i.e. a continual arms race).
The profit is probably there, but I think the cost to get to the profit and the likelihood of failing are both too high to be appealing to investors. Those same investors could just invest in John Deere itself and probably get a better risk-weighted return.
The point of Deere defending their market would be to make it as expensive as possible for outsiders to take. There's no way they would let a billion-dollar revenue stream go for a few million. Just look at how much money was spent in the Google v Oracle lawsuit over Java APIs. Plus, if Deere won, they'd come at you for damages, which would get expensive very quickly.
I don't really understand why the tech-focused crowd has taken this up as some kind of proxy fight when by-and-large we gave up having root access to the machines we do our day-to-day work on decades ago.
> when by-and-large we gave up having root access to the machines we do our day-to-day work on decades ago.
Speak for yourself. I've had root access to my dev machine at every job I've worked.
In any case, not having root access because one's employer owns the machine is locking things down for security is very different to not having root access because the manufacturer prevents even the owners from having root access.
It's a perfect proxy to fight for software freedom and Right-to-repair, because it mobilizes legislators from nebraska and other non-technical folks to speak up about issues that us programmers and techies have been harping about for decades.
Programmers have been enriching themselves for years by creating the tools and infrastructure upon which the massive shift from CAPEX to subscription-based economics has been built and now they want to speak up? I don't want to hear it.
Programmers did this? From my experience, programmers hate this industry shift to "rented" software, and it's the MBAs that have pushed this on us as they've infiltrated the C-suite over the last decade+.
Programmers are also the only group who has been creating an ecosystem of completely free tools that anyone can use or modify for themselves with zero restrictions.
Software has zero production costs and this enables all sorts of uses, moral and not.
Some people are of the view that as soon as we started allowing the government to prosecute people for writing code that can be used to potentially infringe others that the concept of open-source code distribution was too risky for certain projects. Other countries have also incorporated their own DMCA nonsense with varying levels of success so 'dont be American' is not a silver bullet either.
However DMCA has yet to be challenged in the U.S Supreme Court so that is unsettled law.
Software is just taking over the world. I realize that this may make it harder for a farmer with a wrench to fix the machinery as farmers have done for so many years, but it's just reality. If there were a market for stripped-down, software-free, easy-to-fix farm machinery, I would guess someone would fulfill that demand.
This just follows the same trend of patenting crops and animal's DNA. These are all effects of overreaching IP laws creating inescapably profitable business models out of thin air rather than necessity.
Software is only eating the world because we let it. When they're done eating what makes our lunch and lunch box money, then the robot tractors will turn to eat us.
So what's stopping people from making an open-source open-hardware tractor? There's stuff like Open Source Ecology which is very cool but nowhere near what John Deere offers. It's just hard to make stuff on their level and engineers want to be paid big bucks and not work too much. How do you ensure you have enough for their wages with your open-source open-hardware tractor company?
The people who want an open-source open-hardware tractor continue to run their older tractors forever; you can get parts for nearly anything and the oldest tractors can be fixed with a welding torch and a supply of steel.
The cross-section of "willing to pay full price for a brand new farm implement" and "cares enough to get a slower/less featureful device for open-source" is very small. If the open tractor was better and cheaper than the Deere, it'd win even without being open, and if it is not then it has a hard row to hoe.
Construction equipment went down this path long ago, I've heard that Cat will basically give you machines for free as long as you sign up for the service/maintenance contract ...
How many harvests do you have to lose to tractor is down and Deere repair men won't be here for a month, before slightly worse but self repair possible tractor is better, cheaper tractor?
I believe that the culture is just not there, generally. The industry is thinking in short-term ROI and "cost of doing business" ways but are actually locking themselves in which will have immense long-term social (externalized) costs. We hear a lot about GMO's health and environmental concerns but the real issue IMO is the captive business model these proprietary technologies imply. This will take decades to change.
In the current conditions, I agree that an open-source supplier is a though proposition. "The invisible hand" is working on a time scale too short to allow self-regulation, thus the playing field would have to be leveled politically, maybe by changing the IP laws to benefit the people more. Unfortunately, a nation of vehement lawyers is very unlikely to allow this.
Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them? Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development?
> Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting?
What makes you think the breeds they're developing are "better"? Monsanto famously developed "terminator seeds" that were only stopped from distribution under intense pressure from the community since they posed a major risk to the food supply[0]. The seeds were genetically designed to die after one harvest and Monsanto couldn't guarantee that the terminator variants wouldn't cross-pollinate with legacy varieties and inherit the same trait. That is pure greed. Not improvement, not innovation. Pure, unadulterated greed. We have to move past the argument that all businesses are truly innovating all the time. The only thing constantly being innovated is their ability to make money. Take everything else with a grain of salt.
The fact that farmers use them makes me think they're better. Farmers can buy "generic" non-gmo seeds that cost practically nothing. They choose not to, presumably because they believe they won't make as much money.
Which cases involve Monsanto suing a farmer who didn't bring the patented seeds into their land on purpose? Every single case I know of is against a farmer who knowingly planted patented seeds.
Terminator seeds were developed specifically to prevent GMOs from 'contaminating' heritage crops, a case that environmentalists care deeply about. There are plenty of other reasons to criticize the commercial seed industry but this isn't one of them.
> If they aren't better, why would a farmer care if they're for sale? They could just use the older varieties and not suffer any penalty.
Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. Monsanto has license agreements in place that permit them to sue farmers that use their seeds without permission. This means that if your neighboring farmer uses Monsanto seeds and some of the seeds blow onto your land and cross-pollinate, you're now violating Monsanto's patents. They've sued farmers for millions over this[0].
> Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted?
Like I said, Monsanto couldn't prove that terminator seeds wouldn't cross-pollinate with other varieties, which could've triggered a mass-starvation event unlike anything we've ever seen. It's crazy to see people defending this kind of behavior.
> Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued.
If you buy seed from another supplier, Monsanto would sue you? It's incredible you could make this statement without realizing how completely and obviously absurd it is. If this scenario were real, other seed producers could have demolished Monsanto with restraint of trade lawsuits, and would have.
And no, Monsanto never sued a single farmer due to inadvertent contamination from GMO pollen. They stated they never would, and it's very likely that even if they had tried, it would not have worked (since the farmer is not responsible for the contamination.) They DID sue a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field that had been contaminated, to kill off the crops without the trait, and repeated this until he had selected for and concentrated the resistance trait. THAT act, spraying and collecting, showed malicious intent and violated the patent. It's not something an honest farmer would have to worry about.
If terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) caused traces of cross pollination, why would that be a problem? The trait would rapidly select itself out of a population.
Your defense does not come across how you think it does, particularly because it's inherently absurd and devoid of reason.
"You there! Crop! Stop sharing genes! Stop adapting to your environment! This piece of paper says you can't!"
The idea that you can loose a reproducing organism on the world and then sue people when that organism does what reproducing organisms do is just... stop and listen to yourself. You're spouting nonsense syllables that resemble speech.
These things are perfectly reasonable in the world of regular copyright. If you take a photo, and accidentally catch a copyrighted content in the frame, it’s perfectly fine, but if you deliberately crop the copyrighted content from your photo, and reproduce it for financial gain, that’s illegal.
That's a bad analogy. Photographs don't reproduce with each other. Trying to force the notion of "copyright" on nature is an absurdist take that needs to be rejected with prejudice.
If Monsanto's little wet dream does come to pass, I imagine you'll defend things like "Sorry, but Monsanto says you haven't paid your kidney licensing fees, we're going to have to take that transplant back" or "Looks here like you owe us money because one of your ancestors bought some genes from us".
You'll probably say that can't happen for some reason or another, but unless we push back forcefully now, it will. Once you've thrown reason in the trash, all that's left is greed.
> That's a bad analogy. Photographs don't reproduce with each other.
So what? How is this relevant? The crucial aspect is captured by the analogy: accidental copyright infringement is by and large not possible to prosecute, but deliberate infringement by pretending an accident is. Nobody lost a lawsuit to Monsanto just because their crops accidentally shared some genes with Monsanto plants.
> If Monsanto's little wet dream does come to pass, I imagine you'll defend things like
Are you able to maintain some minimal standards of politeness and charity in public discussions? First “spouting nonsense syllables that resemble speech”, now you’re creating a blatant straw man. Is this how you normally talk to people? Maybe I should pick a random organization that I’ll impute you are a fan of, invent some atrocious “wet dream” of it, and pretend that you defend that atrocity. How about that?
I'll be as clear as I can: natural processes such as reproduction of a species inherently cannot be "infringing" because applying copyright to nature is absurd. This is entirely unlike photographs, and I'm not sure how that was relevant to bring up.
> Maybe I should pick a random organization that I’ll impute you are a fan of
If you are "a fan of" any organization such as Monsanto, you should reconsider that choice. Monsanto won't love you back.
EDIT: I'm not really sure why you brought up being a fan of anything, not clear how that was relevant in the first place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you listen to the anti-GMO, anti-Monsanto people long enough, you realize they're arguing in total bad faith, with talking points that make no sense. There's some sort of irrational undercurrent driving it.
I didn't say anything about GMOs. They've done some nice things for humanity. When it's done with the goal of trying to "own" nature via imaginary concepts such as copyright, that is an odious act that must be called out and resisted.
I'm also not inherently anti-Monsanto. You're the one that brought up a scenario where they were acting like cartoon villians. Maybe that should make you pause and think. If you're involved with Monsanto in some way, perhaps you could take some initiative to discourage them from acts of cartoon villiany?
Monsanto sends out their goons to monitor for crops using Monsanto seeds without appropriate licensing. The cross-polination threat is very real and has resulted in a lot of pain and anguish for farmers who choose not to use Monsanto seeds
You are repeating odious propaganda here. Monsanto never sued a single farmer for inadvertent contamination (and would likely have failed miserably if they had tried). They have sued farmers who replanted a licensed crop in violation of the license, and they sued a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field with glyphosate to concentrate traces of resistance genes that had drifted in, so he could produce his own resistant seed. No honest farmer would have anything to worry about.
There was a time (most of history actually) when "honest farming" also involved improving the crops you grow through selective breeding. That's how we ended up with the modern forms of staples like wheat. Now this activity is being portrayed as theft.
I think the burden of proof is on strong IP advocates here. Prove to me that innovation would be stifled if plant patents were not allowed. Because all I see is a massive centralization of that innovation into the hands of a few gatekeepers that get to own the results.
"Oh no, our crops did what crops do, better starting suing!"
Monsanto can get fucked, the idea of patenting nature is so obviously absurd on the face of it that I must assume you were not in your right mind while writing this comment.
The fact remains. Farmers who don't knowingly plant patented seeds have nothing to worry about. The fact that the vast majority use the patented seeds means the seeds are worth more than they cost and the seed researchers are creating value.
Living creatures are compositions of matter, full stop. Patent law applies to them just as it does to any other compositions of matter. There's nothing ethically problematic about this either.
Perhaps (and I am guessing) your problem is that patenting living things is slapping you in the face with the proposition that living things, including yourself, are just arrangements of atoms, and the feeling of dismay at that has transmuted itself into resentful attack on the messenger.
That's an odd supposition. All living things are of course just arrangements of atoms.
Stating "There's nothing ethically problematic about this either" doesn't fix the inherent unethical ramifications of trying to force the imaginary concept of "ownership" onto natural processes. I'm sorry that this is not obvious to you, but I hope that some day you can sit down and reflect why you don't understand that.
> Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development?
I don't get it. Humans have selectively bred better plants for millenia before the era of modern IP. A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? This is ideology, not economics. There are plenty of institutions that would work on improving crops even if Monsanto & co. got out of the game. Universities come to mind here. And the results of their work could actually help farmers that can't afford IP-encumbered crops, not just large, wealthy farmers.
> A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years?
If you are fine with the process being much slower than now, why do you care about 20 years of patent protection? If you’re willing to wait centuries for improvements the modern corporations achieve in years, why not just consider the patent protection period to be extra part of the process? It’s still faster than the millennia you talk about, no?
> Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them?
If that's actually the alternative (and I don't think it is), then yes. Patenting DNA should not be allowed.
But why? You’re proposing something with clear negative consequences. Do you have some reason? Are there some benefits of blocking parenting organisms?
Mmm, I think your wording is clunky. Most of the crops that have patents have the patent on biotech trait. You can take a patent on a newly developed crop variety, just like any other _novel_ invention--plants are no different. Also look up the Plant Variety Protection act (1974?), which also provides IP protection for crops.
Without these, it's debatable how much innovation would occur in crops/plants.
Plants are different. Unlike most inventions plants will generally replicate themselves given the opportunity. The idea that you can sue for patent infringement when this happens naturally is absurd on its face, yet here we are: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention.
Also your comment does not make sense. Some plants are can self-pollinate and are sufficiently inbred so that they 'replicate' themselves. Many plants are out-crossers. There also exists apomixis, asexual reproduction etc. Plant are also well suited to clonal propagation.
'Natural' is a completely vague term. Many of of the crops we have bred and that are IP protected (soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, rice) have effectively 0% chance of occurring 'naturally' in nature because they conditions for their fitness to be high enough likely would never exist.
> Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention.
I never argued that they were patenting wild plants. But bred plants existed long before they could be patented. Indeed, Monsanto did not start with "wild" strains, but with strains developed over millenia of selective breeding. Plant patents are a form of "enclosure", where a domain that was previously freely available to the public (plant breeding) becomes commercialized and monetized so only a few entities can realistically improve on plant strains without risking a lawsuit. How this benefits innovation in the broad sense is beyond me. But it's certainly good for biotech companies' bottom line.
Go check out crop yields of your favorite crop for the past 20,30,50,100 years. Plant breeding and biotech have done _alot_ to reduce hunger and keep food prices low. Previous generations may have breed crops for pure survival reasons (they needed the best genetics to propagate themselves to ensure a plentiful harvest next year).
I enjoy the debate around plant breeding, and there are issues with IP and how that IP is protected/enforced/interpreted. No different than many other industries. It would be difficult to adequately argue that IP in the ag sector has been not been net beneficial for most players (companies, consumers, farmers, etc.).
Private plant breeding corps have only been around for <100 years (many <40). Many research universities and non-profits (CGIGAR, IRRI, CIMMYT, etc.) do plant improvement and had a huge head start. Yet these innovations didn't arise from them.
I would argue they've simply been outcompeted. The market has spoken in many cases. You can still buy non-IP seed, easily. But because there is no-IP, its hard to recoup money and reinvest it thus they stagnate.
Yes, these things get conflated. The one valid concern though, are adjacent fields - one using licensed, IP protected seed, and the other using a heirloom variety. There have been cases of cross-pollination where the non-IP-purchasing heirloom user is accused of using seeds by evidence of the resulting cross-pollinated results. It isn't clear to me if this a just a fear or something that has happened (the lawsuits, certainly cross-pollination occurs).
If it is intentional, that's a no-no IMO (like the oft mentioned Canadian farmer). If its unintentional, there can be no claim of infringement. Lots of grey area in intent, but heirloom and landraces should have just as much freedom to operate (grow) as bred/biotech varieties
> just like any other _novel_ invention--plants are no different.
They are. E.g. Monsanto didn't invent the glyphosate-resistance gene for their Roundup Ready GM crops. The gene was already present in nature, and Monsanto merely copied it:
The novelty was taking it out of one species and putting it into another for a specific purpose. Mother nature didn't transfer that gene across species. How that isn't worthy of IP is not clear to me.
If by "that" you mean gene transfer technology, then I agree. But they also want to patent the result - they do not want a different lab with access to that same technology to be allowed to take a naturally occurring gene and transfer it into crops.
I kind of like all of the computers in my car. The computer control of fuel injection, for instance, has boosted mileage and dramatically reduced pollution. There are dozens of smart chips that are saving lives and cleaning the environment. So, you can demonize it by invoking the patent office or software IP, but if that's part of the trade off, well, I'm generally willing to make it.
What happens when the automaker updates the software in your car to charge you a monthly fee in order to use those same computerized components? This is already happening, most recently with Toyota putting its remote start feature behind a monthly subscription paywall[0]. Imagine buying a car that had all the features you want, only to get an email 6 months later that you now need to pay a subscription to continue using those very same features.
when you buy a car, you can either pay full price for a feature, lets say heated seats for $4000, or you can purchase subscription for $80/mo, or you may opt out of that feature, save money and it will be disabled programmatically in your car. Just as if car was never supplied with heating element for seats.
yet your car will still be shipped with heated seats - just because it is cheaper to do that for manufacturing purposes. Cheaper to equip all cars with the standard heated seats, than manufacture two model of seats: with and without heating.
plus you can always subscribe for that feature any day post purchase, so there is no downside for manufacturer. you get what you pay for.
you can always pay upfront for the feature and will never have to pay subscription
Well the argument here is that a company would also need to be competitive in the actual machinery. John Deere has a huge moat in this space, a company stripped down, software-free and easy to fix machinery would need to make sure that it competes on everything else and has that as a differentiating factor. John Deere probably realized that that's an unlikely proposition and utilizing its market advantage to the maximum.
But I mean the more "abusive" the business model the higher the incentive to innovate, so maybe in the future we could see such machinery.
There already are competitors with less aggressive software, but building massive machines like Deere does requires a lot of capital. Kubota's largest tractor is like 200 HP.
My understanding is that the Clean Air Act now largely requires manufacturers to ensure consumers can't modify the software to run if it fails emissions checks, but I haven't researched the law myself.
Software may be taking over the world, but the "pay us rent forever to use the same software" business model doesn't have to. Right-to-repair should extend to software (for example, providing API documentation to customers), especially after EOL.
