Farmers look for ways to circumvent tractor software locks
npr.orgMy dad is a farmer and I can assure you that this is a real problem. Every piece of equipment now as its own proprietary, closed-source and, most of the time, incompatible software. Plus, many of them don't get any update after the product launch. When you are in rush to plant or harvest you just can`t afford to wait for an authorized dealer. And if they fail, good luck trying to find a replacement that is not 100x overpriced because it has been discontinued one year after you bought it. I tried repairing a GPS system once and it required a special serial cable + software which costed more than 100$ just to update the driver...
Sounds like an opportunity...
I co-founded a company in this space a few years ago. We ultimately pivoted out of the space because for all of the user buy-in that we got, the legal encumbrances were way too high to be able to successfully operate without raising a lot of money just to pay lawyers. If we'd decided to go the VC route instead of bootstrapping we might have been able to make a go of it, but raising VC money for a startup in the midwest working on something as mundane as farming was looking pretty untenable.
Couldn't you make a full electronics replacement kit? It's a bit more involved, but DMCA and other DRM issues just go away. All the original electronics just get removed, to be boxed up and maybe discarded.
You run your own software on your own computer with your own sensors.
It might have been with a much longer team, and a much longer time to market. We were 4 people, and as I mentioned in another comment, getting VC funding for a company in the rural midwest is essentially impossible.
The other issue is that I'm not sure we would have gotten as many buy-ins from the farmers. Many of them were very frustrated by the lack of interoperability between different pieces of equipment, their sensor data being locked behind DRM schemes, etc. They wanted to integrate the hardware and software that they owned, and wanted something that would let them do it piecemeal and with relatively little risk to their hardware. A complete overhaul wouldn't have helped with integrating their historic data, and would have definitely had a higher upfront cost and risk associated with bricking their equipment.
> the legal encumbrances were way too high to be able to successfully operate without raising a lot of money just to pay lawyers.
Were these standard encumbrances that hardware and software makers put to try and lockdown their products, or was there something special about farming?
It was, for the most part, regular DRM and proprietary data/hardware format stuff that is common across industries.
The very high cost of the equipment if it were bricked for license violation, and the very narrow windows for being able to use the equipment (if you need to call John Deere and have them re-enable your tractor you've just potentially lost out on an entire seasons revenue) were also big factors. Many of the farmers that we talked to were fed up enough that they would have risked it, but between our own direct legal risks, and the risk to our reputation if our customers equipment started getting bricked, was enough to stop us from moving forward.
Thank you for the really interesting comments!
.. to get sued for patent infringement. Or DMCA violation.
This is interoperability. At the very least this is a gray area.
"Gray area" here means: budget an awful lot of money for lawyers.
Doesn't mean it's not a good idea, but being naive about it won't get you anywhere useful.
And to be clear, don't expect to win after that awful lot of money is spent. The law makes it really hard to succeed on these types of issues, and judges generally have very stringent/impractical interpretations (such as the interpretation that RAM copies are sufficiently fixed to infringe copyright).
This seems exactly like the type of situation for which the Librarian of Congress would carve out a DMCA exemption.
Perhaps better with the word "should" instead of "would"...
Huh, I did not know that Librarian of Congress was actually a title/position.
It is! And our current Librarian, Carla Hayden, is really incredible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Librarian_of_Congress
If I may go into fanboy mode for a moment, I'd like to say that in my opinion the Library itself is one of the crown jewels of the federal government. It is also definitely worth a visit if you're ever in DC. They give free tours of the Jefferson building, and besides the beautiful architecture of the building itself, there are some very interesting exhibits on display. There's a surprising amount to see, and the staff are great- very knowledgable and friendly.
Besides its main missions of supporting congressional research and acting as the central repository library, the LoC also does a ton of great research on media preservation and archival practices... I got to tour one of their labs once- in one room I talked with an expert in the chemistry of inks used in the 18th and 19th centuries, and in the next room heard from other people who specialized in CD and audiotape manufacturing, who could talk about how specific manufacturing plants in Japan changed processes from year to year and how that affected the archival lifetime of their products. Just amazing stuff, and that wasn't even scratching the surface.
Those are potentially why the lawsuit would fail if you're lucky. You'd still have to fight it at ruinous cost for a small business – and expect customers to disappear if there's any chance they'd be included.
...for famine.
I expect that this software lock is stated in their terms of service. If you don't like or cannot agree with the terms you simply should not buy from them. Unfortunately companies salesman usually don't mention the less nice parts of the deal written in the terms, and that is of course on the edge of swindle.
I think in general companies go more and more aggressive and ruthless to remain profitable and fight opposition, that's our economy..
Also, the options to just "not buy from them" are rapidly decreasing.
Sythes and oxen-drawn plows don't have any terms of service but they are not competitive these days.
I think we'd all be better off if basically everything was open source, by way of eliminating intellectual property protections provided by governments.
As an alternate solution, those of us with engineering skills can work to create an open source economy with open source factories, computers, and products.
This would never be a problem nor would it be likely to happen if genuinely competitive options existed for farmers that were not locked down.
Another way we in this community can help is by helping smaller businesses learn the value of open source and get them using and creating it.
I believe with a sufficiently open source base in our economy, we can make great headway into eliminating material poverty.
I write a little about this on my personal site, here:
The biggest concern I see with eliminating IP is that it effectively eliminates an incentive for innovation. That doesn't mean innovation halts completely, but if the system of compensation does not change, it can be reasonably expected that rates of innovation adjust according to the incentives available for innovators.
What I would prefer is a discounted lump sum paid out to IP owners, at the time of patent filing/copyright. For instance, instead of having to legally defend a medical patent for 20 years and overcharge hospitals/distributors during that time, receive a discounted cash flow equal to the approximate amount of value that would be forgone by pricing the innovation at competitive prices.
Of course this system isn't foolproof, and would be subject to tremendous "gaming" from patent holders and regulators, but innovators could reap the rewards of their innovative research without having to deal with pricing their products out of reach for some individuals who can't afford the price.
Again, it isn't foolproof. But there exists a "most efficient" means of balancing the risk/reward of innovation that lies somewhere between "IP rights should be forever" and "No IP at all."
I hear this constantly but it doesn't ring true to me.
Look at the 3D printer inventors from the 1980's who rested on their laurels selling $30,000 3D printers until their patents expired and the open source community started producing them for under $1000. Ten years after the patents expired, you can get a 3D printer for $199 that genuinely rivals the quality of a $30,000 printer just 10 years ago.
There are all manner of incentives for innovation and profit is only one. But locking down ideas in this way prevents others from improving on ideas, and incentivizes one-time innovators to focus on legal battles rather than continued development.
But would the innovation that led to the creation of 3D printers have taken place if patent law didn't exist? And since the open source movement is based entirely on those patents (as I understand), would cheap 3D printers exist if the 1980s tech was never developed?
I think these are the questions you should be thinking about when arguing against IP protection laws.
Edit: One thing you failed to mention is that the technology available after the patents expired was orders of magnitude more advanced than what was available in the 1980s. For this reason, it's simply a no-brainer that the cost went from $30k down to $1k.
Then there's the whole "maker" movement that happened to coincide with the development of 3D printers which meant that 3D printers had a decently sized potential market. Go back 5-10 years and people didn't even know what the hell a 3D printer was! So it's only natural that the original inventors didn't invest more in optimizing the design and making it cheaper.
Well you don't even need to look just at commercially available products - just look at the FOSS landscape for what gets produced when there is no financial incentive or IP law to protect the material - certainly we would be in a much different place technology wise if we didn't have FOSS as the backbone for a grand majority of technology that exist on the market today, and all of that FOSS was created without the financial incentive or the IP law to protect it.
The existing IP structure can be a useful tool and motivator for people, but it also adds in an extra requirement to all software it touches, whether the designers and coders are conscious of it or not - suddenly, there is a requirement that it make profit on top of what it actually is supposed to do. There's nothing wrong with making money - I'm not here to make a Stallmanistic rant about F/OSS. But this type of structure isn't necessary for great leaps in technology. In the past it was useful because that's how access to the development funds were locked up - you had to play under someone else's banner and their rules to bring you idea to the forefront. Software was different because you didn't need a factory to produce it, and while you still need the factory, you don't need any one particular factory anymore to do the production.
Innovation can and does happen just fine without patent laws or financial incentive.
It's a great point. I'll add that even big companies and government that push for patents use tons of FOSS software because it's better for them. Says a lot, eh? ;)
As long as they are not violating the licenses I see no problem with that.
It depends on your moral system. Lets say it's Mirosoft pushing a server OS, Windows, saying it's better than UNIX's in every way. Definately worth the money. Then we find their Hotmail service runs on FreeBSD for better reliability & performance. I'd say what they tell customers about Windows Server was fraudulent in that situation and they need to get off FreeBSD if they really believe what they preach.
Something along these lines for companies pushing proprietary software and patent suits as good for innovation/productivity while using non-patented FOSS for own innovative or productive projects. It's dishonest. Although, I recall the Hotmail incident actually happening and they had to switch over lol. Same when people found out Microsoft ran on one AS/400.
I'm not talking about software specifically. In general, I support IP protection for industries where significant up-front investment is required for an innovation to come to fruition.
Definitely. Someone else here pointed out all the greatest innovations in CompSci came during 1960-1980's when patent suits were much lower. Mostly government or corporate R&D just pushing the envelope. There's ways to do good hardware-level security I can't touch because the patent creates too much leverage on me. And many vague patents by "Non-Practicing Entities" who didn't build crap cover the same area. I could be hit with who knows how many suits. And looking at them triples the damages so I don't. Only reason I know about those is I accidentally found them googling CompSci papers.
You can bet companied and Universities will still invent stuff if there aren't patents. The companies will do it or acquire it for competitive advantage. The Universities for prestige, investments from companies, creating talented workforce, and so on. Im for software patents, esp on INFOSEC, to be banned entirely as I see no negative impact on high-impact projects.
There are two research incentives. The incentive of potential profit, and the incentive of wanting an end product.
People would have wanted, and invested in, the development of 3D printers for just the personal desire part. This is how the most valuable R&D works right now - the vast majority of cancer and major life debilitating disease research is being done not by big pharma (who are instead just researching more dick enlargement pills and modified recipes of the same drugs on the market today they can re-patent for 20 years and bribe off doctors to prescribe exclusively by name because they are the most reliable payoffs for their investments) but by university and state level research institution and non-profits dedicated to their research.
The unsettling truth is that truly revolutionary research does not often come out of profit driven R&D labs. Those organizations are arranged to minimize the risk of research, which also dramatically cuts its potential yields by only targeting predictable results that can quickly be turned into government-granted monopoly profits. Its exploitation of a flawed system that takes talent that could be going towards truly innovative R&D that would almost certainly offset at least what would be lost in cutting these (predominantly) leeches out of the industry.
Believe it or not, the ideal you are talking about doesn't really exist anymore unfortunately. Even university research nowadays is primarily funded by external sources (government and industry). The more affluent universities have internal funding setup which is typically quite competitive and needs some sort of deliverable anyways. Case in point: the most desirable skill in a university professor is figuring out how to convince others to fund your work, while also giving them something in return. The exception of course is government. NSF and similar government programs are the only funding sources for pure basic research as far as I know.
I am referring to commercial 3D printers which were $30k in 2010, compared to off the shelf printers sold today for $200. The cost of a microprocessor board of sufficient capability hasn't particularly changed between now and then.
The current wave of 3D printers are not based entirely on those patents. They use the same basic principle of extruding plastic filament in layers, but as I understand it the details of how to do this effectively were re-engineered by the RepRap project through years of careful experiments. One of the major tricks used to save material cost and printing time - adjustable density infill - is, as far as I know, entirely unique to the RepRap project and the wave of printers building on its work. I think the use of PLA for 3D printing might be solely their doing too.
I wonder how much more the bunghole of the RIAA/MPAA would tighten up with DRM if it wasn't even illegal to copy stuff they publish with reckless regard. You'd basically have to outlaw DRM too, or everyone would just make their stuff unusable/uncopyable.
If DRM became illegal to even attempt, they'd have a brief period of panic followed by a nice jump in profit when they finally realize they've been wasting bunghole loads of dollars applying DRM to stuff for no reason.
Hah, are you kidding? Even the most advanced VM based protections are routinely bypassed by crackers. Things which have an analog hole vulnerability are just too easy.
The only way something like that would happen is a big shift in hardware towards tamper resistant stuff with hardware crypto. And if all the RE work on that tamper resistant hardware could be done in public things would get... very fun.
At a distance maybe. The mitigations in smartcards or HSM can take expensive teardowns. Especially if on flagship CPU's on advanced nodes. I prefer the DRM'ers stay with software.
OK I've gotta ask, with such a strong push for "eliminating intellectual property protections", why bother with this footer on your site:
© 2017 Objective Bias. All rights reserved.
Not the author, but I similarly support eliminating (well, severely limiting) intellectual property protections and make use copyright at the same time (GPL term enforcement).
With current laws, it's one reasonable way to get close to my ideals. It's the same reason why the Apache 2.0 license is against the friction caused patents by acknowledging them and addressing the issues they raise.
It's using ip law against itself (although I can't really speak for the author in this specific case).
Yes, the FSF has long warned that weakening copyright may also weaken or endanger copyleft.
Good call. That was built in to the Ghost template I am using and I never changed it. I've been meaning to update some things on my site so I will relicense as Creative Commons. Thanks for pointing that out!
Plus, of course: http://jdebp.eu./FGA/law-copyright-all-rights-reserved.html
It's a tangent but I'm all for calling out hipocracy. Author should've used Creative Commons or public domain.
It's not hypocrisy. Defending an overall elimination of IP is not the same as supporting individual self-abnegation. Self-sacrifice that doesn't lead to the desired goal is just masochism.
That wouldn't apply here since the goal was to spread an idea but that copyright made spreading it illegal without a license. Modifying to Creative Commons aids the goal plus is cconsistent with stated principles. So, it's the best move.
Fortunately, the author agrees and intends to change the license.
I just mentioned above (after your comment) that it's just an oversight. That text was built in to the Ghost template I used and I never bothered to change it. But I absolutely will change it to Creative Commons next time I make updates to the site.
Great! Glad it was just an oversight. Creative Commons also has helpful descriptions on their website to simplify picking your preferred license. Will make it easier.
Yes, people seriously underestimate the damage done by carrying over the near-absolute monopolies granted by copyright, which were originally intended for superfluous creative works.
A good compromise may be that software is only eligible for legal protections like copyright if it's source is registered with the Copyright Office, and then the scope of that copyright would limit the commercial resell for 10 years, but would not limit individual or hobbyist use or distribution.
Whatever we do, with core components of basically everything falling under copyright protection due to software, we badly need to revise the law.
There is a large body of law where we have just sloppily slapped a physical metaphor on top of the relevant technology and pretended like that was OK. We need to acknowledge that there are differences and that we need a first-class body of law to address these issues, not just loosely applied law that never could have anticipated the world as it is today.
One example: copies of content kept in RAM qualify as infringing copies under the Copyright Act. Judges have been lamenting that in their decisions since the first one, but they feel the law must be interpreted that way. This has a lot of complicated consequences, and it's just a single example of how our technology law is badly damaged and needs repair.
The biggest reason we don't get this sorely-needed legal renovation is that big companies don't want to even the playing field. They like using the law to bully small innovators.
Just a thought experiment: what if copyright could only be assigned to individuals and not companies?
I'd like to do the same with patents.
> Yes, people seriously underestimate the damage done by carrying over the near-absolute monopolies granted by copyright, which were originally intended for superfluous creative works.
Explain the use of "superfluous" in that sentence, please.
> One example: copies of content kept in RAM qualify as infringing copies under the Copyright Act. Judges have been lamenting that in their decisions since the first one, but they feel the law must be interpreted that way. This has a lot of complicated consequences, and it's just a single example of how our technology law is badly damaged and needs repair.
Can you give some examples of judges lamenting that?
I don't see why you think this particular thing needs repair. Generally programmers and engineers do consider a program loaded into RAM to be a copy of the program. Copyright law uses a fairly simple, common sense definition of "copy" which generally includes things that most people would consider copies. So, we end up with programs in RAM being copies of the program on disk from which they were loaded.
But we don't want running a program that you have a legitimate authorized copy of on your disk to require extra permission from the copyright owner, so we need to find a way to make doing so not count as a violation of the copyright owner's copying right.
There are two ways to do that.
One way would be to change the definition of "copy" so as to not include it.
Another way would be to add a specific limitation on the copyright owner's exclusive rights that says they are not applicable in this case.
The first approach, changing the definition of "copy", is bad. First of all, it makes the legal term "copy" further diverge from the English term "copy", and in this particular case from what programmers and engineers mean when they say "copy". Second, nearly everything in copyright law depends on knowing what a copy is, so adding complexity to the definition to deal with one special case complicates almost everything.
The second approach addresses the particular problem at hand, and does not leak complexity into other parts of the law.
We went with the second approach. See 17 USC 117, "Limitations on exclusive rights: Computer programs" for details.
That's the approach for most special cases in the Copyright Act. Section 101 gives broad definitions, usually reasonably well aligned to the common understanding of the terms. Section 106 gives the copyright owner certain exclusive rights. Then there are a bunch of sections that reign in those rights somewhat, for example with fair use in section 107, library use in 108, and first sale in 109.
If we tried to handle all of that by diddling with the definition of "copy" to make doing those things not involve copies the law would end up ridiculously complicated.
Early disclaimer: IANAL.
>Explain the use of "superfluous" in that sentence, please.
Meaning works that were thought to enhance culture, or, as the Constitution puts it "Science and the Useful Arts", but which were not strictly necessary for anything to function.
Patents were the separate mechanism of intellectual property intended to protect inventions. Patents are correspondingly much weaker and required a disclosure of the invention's mechanisms.
In cyberspace, unfortunately, all of our inventions qualify for copyright (as well as patents) because they're expressed through the "creative work" of software code. This has left us in a situation where a critical component that we depend on every day may stop functioning, and there's nothing anyone can do about it, since practically just thinking about something is a copyright violation these days.
We should update the law so that software is eligible for IP protection only when its source code has been published, similar to the mechanism in place for patents, which requires the mechanisms of the invention to be disclosed.
>Can you give some examples of judges lamenting that?
You're right that I overstated the critical reception of the RAM copy doctrine. I was referring to this section of the judgment which put it forth in MAI v. Peak:
>However, it is generally accepted that the loading of software into a computer constitutes the creation of a copy under the Copyright Act. We recognize that these authorities are somewhat troubling since they do not specify that a copy is created regardless of whether the software is loaded into the RAM, the hard disk or the read only memory (“ROM”). However, since we find that the copy created in the RAM can be “perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated,” we hold that the loading of software into the RAM creates a copy under the Copyright Act.
The Court acknowledges that the concept of when the copy materializes was not well established and calls this "somewhat troubling", but eventually determines that due to the possibility of the content being "communicated" whilst stored in RAM, it should qualify as a copy.
For background, MAI v. Peak was a case about whether a technician had made an infringing copy by running a program installed on a user's PC in the course of maintenance. The Court ruled that since loading a program into RAM is a copy, he had created an infringing copy.
The exception added for computer programs arose from this case, but did not address the RAM copy doctrine. It makes an explicit exemption for "(c)Machine Maintenance or Repair." only. If you're not maintaining or repairing your friend's machine, but you still load up a game he's installed, you've technically made an infringing copy, just as this computer tech had, because you are not doing it for "maintenance or repair".
The RAM copy doctrine is inherently offensive. It makes equal sense to say that the copy created in your brain from the image reflected onto your retinas is an infringing copy, and there's actually a strong case that the image in your human memory is an infringing copy because it is stored in a fixed medium that can be communicated (after proper transformation, i.e., conversion into a sketch; just as a RAM copy requires transformation from numbers-in-memory into something that is displayed on a screen). The RAM copy is no different, except that a computer's "eyes" are not respected; what should matter is what happens with the copies that exist outside of RAM in an actually fixed or tangible form, the end result of the transitory memory "copy".
Neither RAM nor optical nor memorial copies should qualify for infringement on their own due to their transitory nature; you can even make this argument under current law, which requires copies to be fixed and permanent. A clarification is badly needed, correcting the Ninth Circuit's poor judgment in this case.
The real-world outcome is that the precedent set in Feist v. Rural Telco is no longer effective in cyberspace. It's impossible to open a web page and copy the bare, uncopyrightable facts out of it, because the necessary pre-requisite of downloading the exact compilation of facts, which is copyrightable, creates an infringing copy, which you could be successfully sued over even if your end product was not sufficiently derivative to be a derived work under copyright law, and even if the "white pages" never touch your disk; just using your computer to look at/read them without consent is illegal, since the act of loading content into a computer creates a copy.
Another contrived example under RAM copy doctrine: if you've downloaded a song illegally, you are not on the hook for only the copy on your hard disk, but the number of plays, since each one is a distinct infringing copy created by your computer loading the music into its memory repeatedly.
Follow-up question: if the program loads and unloads an unlicensed resource several times in the course of its operation, is each instance a new infringing copy?
There have been several scholarly articles written by actually qualified people (I'm not a lawyer) about how to resolve the issues incumbent in the RAM copy doctrine, so they can cover it. But this is just one example of several legal problems limiting participation and competition in the virtual market. We need to add law to fix this and similar problems.
> The exception added for computer programs arose from this case, but did not address the RAM copy doctrine. It makes an explicit exemption for "(c)Machine Maintenance or Repair." only. If you're not maintaining or repairing your friend's machine, but you still load up a game he's installed, you've technically made an infringing copy, just as this computer tech had, because you are not doing it for "maintenance or repair".
This should fall under 17 USC 101(a)(1), "Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy".
> Another contrived example under RAM copy doctrine: if you've downloaded a song illegally, you are not on the hook for only the copy on your hard disk, but the number of plays, since each one is a distinct infringing copy created by your computer loading the music into its memory repeatedly.
When a plaintiff sues for copyright infringement and wins, he can ask for actual damages plus the infringer's profits (17 USC 504(b)), or he can ask for statutory damages (17 USC 504(c)).
If he asks for actual damages and profits, then the number of times the song was played will only be relevant if somehow the more it was played the more it caused actual damage to the plaintiff or if the downloader was doing something that made money from playing the song repeatedly.
If he asks for statutory damages, they are awarded per work infringed, not per infringing copy. The number of times the copy was actually played would probably only have an affect on the outcome if the defendant was trying to argue that they had not intentionally downloaded the song. (The "a virus must have downloaded it!" or "it must have been one of my kids!" approach is popular).
>This should fall under 17 USC [117](a)(1), "Making of Additional Copy or Adaptation by Owner of Copy".
It says that the owner may "make or authorize the making of" a copy for this purpose. This means that whether or not the copy is infringing will hinge on the language of the authorization granted by the owner.
It's noteworthy that despite the language of "...or authorize the making of..." being in place prior to MAI v. Peak, the Peak technicians were not considered sufficiently "authorized" to make a copy by running a program that the computer's owners had purchased, even though doing so was a necessary component in fulfilling their duties. One would think that logically, the owner's authorization to make the copy would've applied.
Going back to the decision to see the reasoning on this, I find nothing specific discussing why the authorization from the software's owners would not have applied. [0]
There is some commentary about how in a prior case, copying the program onto "silicon chips", meaning the fixed medium of a diskette (non-floppy), was ruled infringement because it was "not an essential step" in using the software, since it could be used by copying it only into RAM. Since the software could be used from RAM after being read from disk, it was "fixed" copy under the statute.
That's all well and good (not really, but discussed above), but it doesn't say why the authorization of the owners of MAI software was insufficient to allow the computer technician to make copies as his/her agent, necessitating the addition of subsections (c) and (d) in 1998.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/991_F2d_511.htm#...
> It says that the owner may "make or authorize the making of" a copy for this purpose. This means that whether or not the copy is infringing will hinge on the language of the authorization granted by the owner.
It says "owner of a copy". That's referring to the person who owns the particular copy of the program installed on the machine, not to the owner of the copyright.
Yeah, I know. That's what I'm referring to. Peak was shut down for copyright infringement, despite being authorized to use MAI software by owners of the copy of that software, their clients, who would have granted "authorization", and despite the statute's statement that owners of a copy can authorize the making of additional copies insofar as it's an essential step in the use of the program. Why would this authorization of the copy's owner not cover Peak's use of the software?
If the software was open source, it would be modified and tuned to maximize power output, and would belch huge plumes of particulates, CO, and NOx. How do you balance openness against the public good of controlling this pollution? These are, perhaps, the primary reasons that engine control software is so complicated these days, on diesels and gas engines.
Since the software is closed source we don't know if it's cheating emissions testing or not.
Touche.
I think high risks and catastrophic consequences would prevent most farmers from hot-rodding their tractors. You buy a tractor of a certain size, which is designed to run the implements that attach to it, and you run it and maintain it on a predictable schedule. If you modify it to make more power... the benefits are questionable, and you risk unpredictable downtime which jeopordizes your ability to cultivate your crops properly.
Imagine your employer spent a million dollars on a server that runs everything critical to their operation. You can overclock it easily. Do you?
Pumping "huge plumes of particulates, CO, and NOx" into the soil would actually be good for farming. It fertilizes the soil and kills some of the bugs.
Make such modifications illegal and require regular checks.
Do even better than that: have the government do random checks with drones, and if someone's found to be violating, seize their entire farm. Do make sure to include a provision to make sure they weren't non-compliant by accident (equipment failure not caused by illegal modification, or perhaps due to illegal action by manufacturer a la VW).
If you make the penalties for non-compliance devastatingly high, then very few people will risk it.
Also, companies found to be intentionally non-complaint like VW should simply be seized, not just fined. The executives should be tried criminally and imprisoned, and the rest of the company seized and sold.
>I think we'd all be better off if basically everything was open source, by way of eliminating intellectual property protections provided by governments.
Ok, before going a single step farther it has to be prefaced: this entire sentence is utterly non-sensical because "open source" is 100% based upon intellectual property protections provided by governments. That was the whole genius of it from the start, that it made use of existing IP law for an entirely new purpose and direction. But you can try out "eliminating IP protections" yourself right now, it's called Public Domain. Try releasing your work as that, and, should it be sufficiently popular/valuable, see exactly how long it stays "open source". No IP = no open source, because by definition with no IP anyone can take it and do whatever they want with it, including using technological rather then legal protections.
Going beyond that though, so far the people I've seen entirely reject IP don't seem to understand exactly what the IP-hack is for. The absolute core, fundamental problem is thus:
Unlike matter, the replication of information is (effectively) free, but the generation of information most certainly is not. Also unlike matter, the "protection" of information fundamentally represents a societal cost.
The result is a resource allocation problem, though with a set of collective twists. As infinite resources do not exist, and only some information is of value, it is desirable to have some way to efficiently allocate resources to the generation of "valuable" information, but then also have that provide the most efficient value and effect in society overall. Protecting information individually isn't fully possible, and any temporary ways to do so are highly inefficient to all parties. Protecting information cooperatively can be more efficient, but represents an ongoing an cumulative societal cost.
Untangling this particular Gordian Knot of conflicting priorities is tricky but also of critical importance, and I doubt we have arrived at the best solution yet. But so far Intellectual Property seems to be the best one. IP is basically a hack to try to apply Free Market mechanisms (so massively distributed value appraisal with a capital intermediary/feedback) to information generation, while (at least theoretically) taking into account the significant differences between information and physical property. This means restrictions on what exactly is worthy of IP, categories for different types of protection to address different generation issues, a crude attempt to deal with the cumulative cost issue via limited lifetimes (which has been corrupted), etc. It is unfortunately subject to all the standard problems with societal programs: regulatory capture, perverse incentives, struggling to get out of local minima that are far from absolute minima, and so on. But that some of this is a challenge doesn't mean that throwing out the baby with the bathwater is a good idea either. No matter what the information generation problem in a limited resource world is not going to go away, and a polity utilizing an inferior solution is going to be less efficient at it and thus, over time, lose out to polities that utilize IP.
So I think your efforts are much, much better focused on trying to wrest back the balance of the IP process so that the hack, however ugly, better matches the constraints. Bring back shorter time limits is an easily graspable idea, if anything modern networks and systems that drastically reduce time-to-market and distribution costs should result in a lower, not longer, lifetime. Better still would be some sort of reactive measure so that IP can more optimally respond to its value, like an exponentially increasing yearly maintenance cost after a minimum period. There are lots of different good ideas out there. But please resist blanket "easy" solutions to something that very much is not easy unless you've really thought through the universal problem space and have arguments as to why your replacement is better then the existing regime.
Well, I should say that I respect and appreciate your response. Certainly I can't truly think through the universal problem space, as no one can.
I also feel that at least my government (in the US) is so owned by corporations and the wealthy that it no longer represents my interests, and I tend to reject any solutions that endow in that government certain powers. As such I would disagree with intellectual property on philosophical grounds even if I didn't disagree with it on technical grounds. I simply don't think it's the government's place to attempt to fix markets in this way, and I don't want to be subject to it.
As it is, I see extreme waste in our world from intellectual property laws that ultimately send manufactured goods to the garbage dump sooner than they need be disposed of. Cars that could be repaired, if only an electronic module wasn't subject to monopoly control and unnecessarily high prices. I see poor children unable to access high quality textbooks despite the information being readily copyable. I see developing nations struggling to get on their feet while the rich nations keep their valuable knowledge to themselves.
I don't mind technological means of obfuscation, because those at least can fail. It is only the legal means of obfuscation that prevents us as humans from making every book ever written freely available to all people. I reject the idea that no one would write books in this new future, but I do understand the change would bring about great new problems that need to be solved.
But it is my life goal to find ways to reduce the marginal cost of human survival to zero, so we can care for everyone voluntarily. In order to do that, we absolutely must eliminate artificially inflated costs in that chain. That can be done voluntarily through the creation of an open commons, which I believe is more realistic, or it can be done more powerfully through the weakening and ultimate elimination of IP protection laws.
But you are correct that the real change that is needed is not an end to IP laws, but the stimulation of a culture which values sharing out of a love for one another. I believe that only a culture based on love can truly thrive.
> It is only the legal means of obfuscation that prevents us as humans from making every book ever written freely available to all people.
I would bet that most writers do not want to make their books freely available. If they did how would they pay the rent? And would they be able to even write them then?
I think you missed a critical part of my comment - I see eliminating IP laws as critical to reducing the cost of living to zero. In this zero cost of living world, no one needs to pay rent.
In reality I believe zero is a worthy target but difficult to achieve, so I really expect us to hit "very low". In that world, the cost of living is so low that we can voluntarily support others at very little cost to ourselves, and with a minimum of Love for our fellow humans, those with income can support those without. In that world, authors are more free than ever to write what they truly believe. They have no publishers to please nor masses to target, and can write what they deem most valuable to write.
That will just lead to the Chinesium-ization of all things. No real innovation will occur...just churning out commodity designs in the Far East.
I always find comments like these amusing because it's exactly what people said of the Japanese in the 60's and 70's. And in exactly the same way, the Chinese (and other up and coming players) are innovating: just not in the areas that some people are looking. It starts with undercutting the market with low labour rates, but as times move on and the populace has higher expectations in terms of living conditions, the companies have to innovate on production. The Japanese transformed automobile production -- and not with low wages and crappy knock off goods. They absolutely ate everybody's lunch on efficient, quality construction. They built better cars and the rest of the world spent 10 years playing catch up.
It's this complacency, and in many cases a lack of respect, that allows this to happen. Make no mistake, they are doing great things in China right now and if western companies don't react quickly enough, their lunch will be eaten again.
The Chinese model of innovation is very different, precisely because they have a very different notion of IP too:
You're making a prediction without stating your reasoning.
What makes you think this?
The example I would point to is the one involving American Superconductor and Sinovel [1][2]
American Superconductor was working with Sinovel on wind turbines. They made the software and Sinovel made the physical product. Sinovel decided they wanted to cut out American Superconductor so they paid an employee $1.7 million to leak to them the source code. After which they cut them off. To add insult to injury Sinovel then sold these wind turbines back to the state where American Superconductor is located.
Sinovel did not even attempt to change the software which is actually how they first got caught. They were inspecting a wind turbine and realized it was running an unreleased version of their software.
There was even an incident last year of an idea for a new selfie stick getting stolen before they even were done with their kickstarter campaign.[3]
In both cases the original creators who did innovate and put time into designing something got cut out. Is that fair?
[1]http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-great-brain-robbery-c... [2]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/business/energy-environmen... [3]https://qz.com/771727/chinas-factories-in-shenzhen-can-copy-...
And that's different than what we're doing in the US now?
Every problem's already been solved; you just don't have access to its solution. Wouldn't being able to work off of others' successes make you more productive? Doesn't that apply to everyone?
"Everything open source" would take away the incentive for people to create essentially all media professionally: software, music, TVs/movies, podcasts, journalism, and more. Many industries would be destroyed if they didn't have the right to sell their creations (if anyone could copy them and give them away). I personally enjoy the media created by many organizations such as NPR, which made the article we're reading now. I enjoy many audio and written books and podcasts and video games. The professional software industry would vanish, as would the entire video games industry, and NPR. Programs for creating art and video would stop being made for sale.
If there was no IP protection, anyone could redistribute NPR's podcasts and news articles while stripping the advertising from them. Advertisers would stop sponsoring NPR, and its budget would diminish substantially. It would stop producing quality content like this article. The ability to lawfully distribute free copies of all video games and video content would diminish their sales to a fraction of today, and shut those industries down. The only media industries left would be ones based on live performance / live display.
I'd like to retain the incentives for these creators to continue thriving by publishing good work, which means retaining these intellectual property protections. I think we can fix the problem that appears to exist in this situation in other ways, such as by strictly curtailing the rights of equipment manufacturers to restrict what purchasers can do via licenses, and by buffing the first sale doctrine to include right of repair, and perhaps creating or strengthening legal requirements that when you purchase a physical good, must not hinder the ability to repair it, and the software needed to operate the good must be included in the price and must operate (must not be intentionally time-limited) for a reasonable period of time. The duration of copyright should also be significantly reduced, to something like 20 years maximum.
"Companies like Microsoft would vanish"
Heaven forbid! :-D
I go around telling people what I think of copyright all the time, and this argument is one that I hear a lot.
But I don't buy it. The body of open source content available today is proof that your argument is at the very least incomplete. Plenty of people do give their time away for free to make better things available to people without monetary benefit.
A key to my argument is as follows: people who give away their work tend to be on the wealthier end of the spectrum with some ability to give their time away - a single mother of four who works 60 hours a week probably isn't submitting pull requests in her spare time.
So then you say I have a flaw - only wealthy people can contribute to a world without IP laws. But again I disagree. In the world without IP laws, I believe deeply that the wealth we already have would be more evenly distributed, and the floor of minimum wealth would be much higher. I think in a world without IP laws, so many people would be so much wealthier that they could afford to voluntarily support those who still cannot support themselves.
I should also point out that there's absolutely still an incentive to create things even without IP protection, so I disagree with your argument on its face. Certainly there is a greater incentive to create when creators can legally bar others from selling their works, but that does not mean the incentive without IP laws is zero. To the contrary, innovators maintain first mover advantage and are free to build brand awareness. I'd rather buy something from a creator than a copycat, since the copycat is more likely to cut corners that materially impact the quality of the offering.
On balance I believe we would see MORE wealth and more innovation without IP laws, and while I may be wrong I think it's important to question the conventional wisdom that IP laws help innovation. I think in many ways they harm it.
Try making friends with a musician. Make sure they're a local act or play in a local band. Often they have mouths to feed and mortgages to pay, and would love to do so with their art but can't because the economics don't support it. Almost invariably, they talk about how it used to be better, back when people bought physical phonograph albums; among the musicians I know the politics are uniform: strong copyright helps them make money, digital (including Napster and streaming) has destroyed much of the value of their work, and some form of unobtrusive DRM would be a boon to struggling artists.
Just because you don't think copyright protects your interests, doesn't mean it doesn't protect someone's.
I am explicitly considering people totally unlike me, and I seriously think the musicians of the world would be better off without copyright too. Aside from the major rockstars, most artists I imagine are concerned with putting food on their tables, maintaining shelter over their heads, and keeping clothes on their backs.
I claim that without intellectual property the average person would have significantly more material wealth, the cost of living would be lower, and it would be much easier to maintain a living off of patronage than it is today.
My personal long term life goal is to understand how to reduce the marginal cost of supporting a human life to zero, so "we can have socialism for free" as I sometimes say. This necessarily requires that we eliminate artificially inflated costs, which is what intellectual property is. It requires other things, including more automation, but that will come. The issue is that more automation WITH intellectual property law means the wealthy of today will maintain their power over the poor tomorrow, continuing to artificially inflate prices for their own profits at the expense of average people. I believe that would be much more difficult to do if there were no intellectual property protections.
From what I read, it wasn't that much better in the past - record labels were the gatekeepers and ate most of the profits.
But frankly, and with no offense to musicians out here, nobody is entitled to their business model working. Some things can make sustainable living, some can't. Turning otherwise infeasible business models into working ones with regulation is something that should be done with care, and should be done to benefit society, not individuals.
From my perspective (having played in local acts), the decline of the local musician career more points to a larger combination of converging trends:
- Increasing technology (eg: there is much less need for certain careers. An example is the local mid-grade demo studio; these have largely closed with computers able to easily exceed the old demo studio's quality)
- Corporate homogenization. In the 1990s, radio stations merged and became more national. This resulted in stations paying less attention to local markets. The same can be said for record labels. The same can be said for local music venues, which in some places are also in decline. (https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/sep/09/the-slow-deat...) Ergo: there is less room for "regional hits" and regional music scenes.
- A huge increase in entertainment choice, lowering overall demand.
- Various entertainment trends that hurt certain types of musicians more than others (eg: In pop, today there is much less of a focus on band-oriented music, replaced with DJ/electronic type music)
None of this had much to do with IP. In fact, streaming / Napster / etc. may actually help some local musicians a touch (particularly in more niche genres), by allowing musicians to gain exposure in a way that is outside the standard corporate music environment (replacing the old tape trading circles of before).
Of course, exposure alone doesn't pay the bills. And there's certainly a case that streaming / Napster / etc. hurt the income of established musicians that relied heavily on album sales for their paychecks. But to me, it's strange when local musicians focus on only that (and yes I have heard the same from some). That route of income didn't really apply even in pre-Internet times, until you got "signed". (And if you weren't biz savvy, you could easily get screwed by that route too, see Albini's famous rant -- http://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music )
Like you said: we already have copyright, and yet they can't making a living from music anyway. How's that an argument for keeping it around?
because good music, games, journalism, and useful algorithms didn't arrive in humanity until the invention of (EDIT) intellectual property law
You are ignoring technological change over time. As you go back in time, the time and effort to make copies goes up, the costs of distribution goes up, and the speed of distribution goes down. All of those raise the natural advantage that the original producer has over copiers.
For example, when Charles Dickens was writing and publishing his novels in serial form in magazines he didn't have any significant problem with unauthorized copies in the United States even though at the time the United States copyright law did not cover imported foreign works such as his.
That was because by the time the unauthorized publishers got a hold of the next chapter and could get started with the typesetting for making their own copies, the authorized copies for the United States were already sailing across the Atlantic. They makes of unauthorized copies would have to wait for another transatlantic sailing to get theirs to the US.
The result was Dickens' authorized copies were the only ones available in the US for something like a month or so. By the time unauthorized copies could make it over, something like 95% of the people who were interested in the story had already read it in the authorized magazine.
Google "The Uneasy Case for Copyright" and you can find an essay by United States Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer written in 1970, when he was still an academic, arguing that these kind of natural advantages of being first to market had generally been enough incentive for creators. There have been a couple essays in response too, which should show up on that search.
Patent law and copyright are two different things.
They didn't.
Going back to "...limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" would do wonders to making the situation w/ copyright better.
Yes, reining copyright terms in, putting in strong protections for individuals and hobbyists so that copyright is irrelevant to anyone with less than $1M in revenue, and liberalizing fair use (which unfortunately probably also means seriously overhauling our judicial processes to be not horrendously slow and expensive) would make copyright far more tolerable.
IMO the ideal would be something like 10 year copyright terms, with restrictions like requiring all software subject to copyright protection to submit its source.
Less than $1M? Then my personal business would evaporate because everyone would copy it for free. I provide value to people and they pay me and it supports my family. You're saying I should stop doing that work and become, I don't know, a bricklayer instead? I won't be able to do open source work because that doesn't generate money.
Nahh, if that's the case, then even more onerous DRM would take hold. And that would be because copyright woudn't exist for a multitude of people. And DRM would be the enforced control, rather than the threat of massive software copyright lawsuit.
And likely, remote kill would also be implemented to nuke the software from the owner's point of view, in cases like alleged breach of contract and "pissed off owner' sort of reasons.. Like what Garagdet did when a customer posted a bad review of their IoT crap.
I wasn't clear. I meant that copyright violations generally would be something that people with less than 1 million in revenue didn't have to worry about, not that it's protections would be irrelevant to them.
I have the feeling that somehow the actual need has been put aside for phylosophical (or Open Source, etc.) reasonings (nice but not the original issue).
More or less what the good farmers are asking for (which is not about the code, the kernel or whatever, they are not "hackers" as much as the authorized JD technicians are not computer experts or programmers or software engineers) is just access to the "database" of parts serial number of the machine.
Loosely the way it works (simplified) is a database where the (say) pressure sensor #42 has been registered (authorized) in the operating system as having serial number #0123456789. When the sensor breaks, after it has been replaced with a new (original or verified third party) sensor, you need to update the database telling it that sensor with serial #0123456789 has bee replaced with sensor serial number #2223334445 and - of course it depends on the specific part - possibly run a "self-test" program to verify that the sensor works properly and maybe tune/regulate it.
The farmers do not want the source code, they don't want to modify it, they don't want to "hack" anything, they simply want to be able to replace a part and have the thingy work.
Going back to software, let's talk of - say - Windows 7 (yeah I know that all the rage is about Windows 10 nowadays) and its activation, imagine that instead of having one month time to activate a new install either through the internet, the automated phone call in case it doesn't work and a support phone call for particular cases where the previous two options do not work, activation was:
1) Immediately mandatory (i.e. the OS wouldn't work until activated)
2) ONLY available through a local visit of a MS agent (9 to 5 , Monday to Friday) at a cost of (say) US$ 100.00/hour + US$ 1.00/mile
More like this, following your example. Install a new video card. Windows won't boot until a certified tech comes by, at $100/hour and $1/mile.
Yes, exactly. And of course you are replacing that video card not because you just fancy it, but because the video card in your 24/7 vital/mission critical PC just burned (and this kind of things - from experience - tend to happen between friday 11:00 PM and saturday 3:00 AM ;))
Actually, I experienced something like that. I had a defective motherboard. The manufacturer sent me one flashed with the wrong reseller code. Windows wouldn't boot. No workaround. Had to wait for a new motherboard.
>The farmers do not want the source code, they don't want to modify it, they don't want to "hack" anything, they simply want to be able to replace a part and have the thingy work.
One way to fix this would be for a farmer to sue the manufacturer for business interruption for millions of dollars.
When planting or harvesting, especially when bad weather is coming in, you are on a tight deadline.
Inability to replace a perfectly functional physical part due to this kind of software lockdown could cost a farmer lots of money.
I'm guessing JD has lawyers smart enough to protect the company against something like this. For one, I'm guessing the purchaser / licensee agreed to binding arbitration. As well, the purchaser / licensee probably also agreed to release JD from any responsibility for losses due to malfunction (where malfunction is defined by JD).
> One way to fix this would be for a farmer to sue the manufacturer for business interruption for millions of dollars.
But you'd need to find a farmer who's willing to take a risk and spend a lot of money that they may not have while their crop rots in a field.
>ONLY available through a local visit of a MS agent (9 to 5 , Monday to Friday) at a cost of (say) US$ 100.00/hour + US$ 1.00/mile
Microsoft really should adopt this approach to customer service. It's been very successful for John Deere obviously, so for MS it should be even more successful. They could increase their profitability greatly. Who cares if it pisses off customers? They're not going anywhere; they'll just pay up and gripe about it. There is literally no reason MS should not treat their customers this way. They're missing out on a lot of revenue here.
I don't get why all this chat is about software, licensing and software safety.
The way I read it, a farmer can't change even, say, a brake pad (or whatever tractors use) without authorization from John Deere. I very strongly doubt that they want to mess with the software, they just want to perform minor maintenance themselves.
Some farmers want to change engine curve profiles to get more power out of their engines, likely at the expense of Tier IV emissions regulations and possibly damaging the drivetrain. I don't believe this is the normal case, but I have heard this expressed in the past.
This does seems to be John Deere's primary motivation. They make the exact same mechanical machine to serve many different market segments, and then assign each model's capabilities, like horsepower, in software. Of course, the consumer soon figures out that by flipping a couple of bits they can buy the less expensive machine and upgrade it at little to no cost.
Thus ensues the debate of who owns the tractor.
> They make the exact same mechanical machine to serve many different market segments
Do you know that they do? Parent only talked about running the machine out of spec altogether but your theory could explain a few things if it's true.
I used to work in John Deere Power Systems. The parameterization exists to allow Deere to sell their engines all over the world (different emissions regulations), to a variety of different equipment manufacturers (barges have different power requirements than tractors than cranes than etc). I'm not aware of any "pay to unlock more power" schemes, but I also wasn't particularly attentive toward pricing.
You're quoting the dealer now. Not exactly the most reliable source.
There was another article about this a few days ago (it's linked somewhere in one of the comments) and the basic description was "can't do any repairs in place" not "i want to overclock my engine".
No, I'm summarizing my engineer friends and former colleagues within John Deere Power Systems.
Even worse ;)
:) I don't think they much care. In particular, they freely express plenty of criticism about various company practices; I doubt they'd have bias about this issue in particular.
Hey all, I worked on software for John Deere. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Opinions expressed here are MY OWN. I no longer work for John Deere or am associated with them in any way.
I was part of one of the many teams that work on this software. Specifically I was part of John Deere's ISG division also known as the Intelligent Solutions Group. The ISG division (was at the time) responsible for tying together various software built by OEM's, for building the central UI within the cabin, and for building various debugging and build tools. The team I was on, consisted of about 8 very senior engineers, and I think there were around 20 total engineers working for ISG at the time (though I saw, and knew only a handful of them). Now, when I say OEM integration, I mean suppliers and other John Deere divisions with their own teams mirroring ours. All told, I would estimate that John Deere has somewhere between 150-300 engineers working full-time on their codebase for their tractors.
Let me disabuse you of any myths. I have worked in software for 20 years. I have worked in large enterprises, and scrappy startups. This software is by FAR the largest, most complex codebase I have ever interacted with. Submission of any new code was seriously considered and reviewed before it entered production (sometimes to a pedantic degree), after which JD put all new code through 10s of thousands of hours of testing on production equipment. Production and release cycles take on the order of months to ensure that we don't kill people.
These are not riding lawnmowers. They are 30-ton combines, and 20 ton tractors tilling fields, with massive horsepower behind them. They have a real potential to end peoples lives in the event of failure, and these tractors do (in testing) fail in spectacular ways. If a team of hundred of engineers struggle with their codebase internally, Joe Farmer isn't going to have a fucking clue how to repair their software correctly.
Now should you, in theory, have the right to modify equipment you own? Sure. Absolutely. Hell, John Deere tractors run on open source software. But trust me on this, locking this down is a very good idea.
If you have the drive to make open source tractor software AND can make absolutely certain no-one ever dies from code you write, then go do it. Just keep in mind that the engineers that work on this shit really care about keeping people safe.
>But trust me on this,...
isn't a way to make a good argument.
From TFA "Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key."
and from a comment above
"Plus, many of them don't get any update after the product launch. When you are in rush to plant or harvest you just can`t afford to wait for an authorized dealer. And if they fail, good luck trying to find a replacement that is not 100x overpriced because it has been discontinued one year after you bought it."
the problem seems to be that the process of updating software (a) takes too long (b) is too expensive (c) sofware is not updated once the tractor has been sold.
In an ideal world, where such a break down can be instantly fixed by JD for a reasonable fee, and JD actively updates the software on the equipment they sell till End of Life, this problem wouldn't exist.
Farmers don't care about open source etc. They just want to do their jobs. I'm astounded by the fact that JD takes no responsibility for updating software till end of life of the tractor.
I can guarantee you that all of these tractors will have the POSSIBILITY of over-the-air telemetry and software updates within a few years. The question still comes down to paying the support fees and getting the updates or modifications, but the physical act of "waiting for a tech" for software will be a non-issue very shortly, if not already.
Can someone speak definitively about updates from JD? It would really surprise me that JD "doesn't update" their software after the sale. It's probably covered by a service contract you need to keep paying for, but I strongly suspect that they update and patch software for many, many years after the product release.
Source: I work for a certain, huge diesel manufacturer, and am starting at a slide about telematics right this very moment.
This may be related to farmers not taking the tractors to repair shops.
The automotive component I worked on was firmware updated every time the customer took the car to a service for eg. to change oil, and an update was necessary.
The tools needed for this were pretty expensive though, and needed some expertise, as the process was somewhat complicated. I understand why this is not trusted to owners.
> The tools needed for this were pretty expensive though, and needed some expertise, as the process was somewhat complicated.
This is a problem.
If the lack of updates inconveniences their customers and potentially causes loss of earnings, isn't the onus on JD to improve the update mechanism? Make it as simple as inserting a USB stick, and then ship out those sticks periodically? It doesn't have to be OTA or anything fancy.
> The tools needed for this were pretty expensive though, and needed some expertise, as the process was somewhat complicated.
There's a pretty good chance that was done intentionally.
Yes, but not in the sense you suggest. Ironically to save costs for the consumers, and improve reliability. Making the system suitable for safe updates without proper disconnecting and partial disassembly and tolerant to untrustad (also in electrical not only in software sense) peripherials would have added a lot to the piecewise cost. (think: more I/O protection electronics, more testing of upgradeability testing with untrusted tools with many failure modes, durable upgrade connectors fitting the size and other constraints).
Still no user could and should upgrade that software, as any complication or untrusted software would be a safety hazard, and lengthy official regulatory evaluation and approval process is needed needed for every new version. (think: Road Permission Level revalidation may be needed (overseen by authorities) to allow a firmware to take part in traffic)
The repair shops can save lots of cost compared to end users, as these tools are not cheap, but compatible with most manufacturers, so are needed anyway.
> If a team of hundred of engineers struggle with their codebase internally, Joe Farmer isn't going to have a fucking clue how to repair their software correctly.
> But trust me on this, locking this down is a very good idea.
Joe Farmer may not know, but Joe farmer has "the internet", and ability to pay an independent software engineer. And people would absolutely find and fix bugs that john deer is missing.
Honestly, your argument sounds so ridiculous, it sounds like saying "it's to protect the children from terrorism."
So semi related, been in software for 20 years and contemplated getting a Motec w e-throttle for my (road legal) race car "no f-king way" is my thought process, I've got a race engine management system but no way I'm having anything other than a cable between me and the throttle body. I love software, I love engineering, I love what an e-throttle can do for traction control. But there will always be bugs with software ...I'd trust a road car with massive engineering teams, I struggle with the thought of a smaller team and how it could possibly go wrong. I personally get where he's coming from ... I can't imagine single engineers being able to test and have foresight on the umpteen permutations of "what-if"
I have worked in automotive and the testing of a software release took about 1 month for a ~150 member team. Yes, documentation because legal requirements was as much as 10% of the human labor, but the tests ran for a month in simulated environment.
This was not a particularly large software, about .5MLOC total with 3rd party RTOS as well (not in our test scope).
The tests did find unexpected bugs, as the dynamic behaviour of the system was much harder to reason about than about the single components, and sometimes pretty weird system effect kicked in.
I'd also not trust this to small teams, this is simply way more complicated than one presumes prior to experiencing it personally.
> I can't imagine single engineers being able to test and have foresight on the umpteen permutations of "what-if"
Maybe the answer to this is to have the software unit tests open source as well, and document the hardware integration tests (including spectacular failures) on Youtube.
Also, if it's built on open source as he says, that likely means linux, and tons of code that John Deer is not reviewing, so... trust you that john deer needs to protect farmers from letting people fix the code THEY WROTE. lol.
I'm out here in the soybean/corn/dairy fields of Wisconsin. I'm not originally from here but i'll tell ya, some of these farmers are brilliant! These rednecks have their trucks and their tools and are frequently more ingenuitive and resourceful than anyone anywhere else in the world. Most of these folks would outfit their tractor with bucket seats, two cup holders, falcon wing car doors, and a keggerator if it didnt come standard.
If Joe Farmer doesnt know, he will figure it out.
What happens if this independent fix results in a death? Do you really think JD will escape liability?
This is not exactly uncertain ground. Car manufacturers don't have liability when their customers modify their cars. Whoever made my clothes dryer doesn't have liability for any unsafe condition I may or may not have created when I removed that stupid annoying buzzer.
Yes, for exactly the same reason that if I overclock my intel CPU then if it starts a fire intel won't be blamed because they expressly put that if I overclock or modify the CPU settings from the factory default they wont be liable into the terms of service and unlike many software SLAs it is accepted by courts around the world
Of course they will. If a hit man cuts your brake lines, Ford will not be liable.
I absolutely think JD would escape liability. Consider the more egregious cases of any number of high-profile companies who have had significant customer data breaches in recent memory. Regardless of how negligent they may have been (lets say they stored user passwords in plain text), have you ever heard of a company being held responsible for even the most egregious/reckless behavior?
Independent mechanics have been repairing machinery for as long as machinery has existed. This is not an exotic legal problem.
Life is full of risks. This is, or may be, one of them. Allowing a handful of opaque corporations to monopolize the tools of food production and dictate their after-sale use is another risk.
Sorry, but you sound like someone who never worked with complex and safety critical software.
May I hope that this "independent software engineer" will also test everything after his changes?
If you could explain in reasonable detail a few common scenarios faced by the average farmer with an issue that would necessitate JD engineering expertise, I would very much appreciate it. Specifically, I'd be interested in hearing how the repair work orders that come in to JD engineering most frequently justify the claim that 'locking this down is a very good idea'.
Who, aside from the operator of the machine, is being put in such grave danger? Why am I, someone with no knowledge of combustion engines/cars in general, allowed to do my own work on the car that conceivably endangers thousands of fellow commuters each day, but a farmer driving a tractor (that lets say he's changed the engine timing on) in his own empty fields is somehow a great threat to society?
I would wager that Joe Farmer has a significantly stronger 'fucking clue' how to repair the issues they encounter with their tractors than Joe Developer at John Deere. Mostly because unless they're doing an aggressively poor job on the software (that you're convinced is too complicated for the unwashed masses to wrap their feeble minds around), the farmer shouldn't even need to be aware of its existence.
Additionally, I think you and I both know the vast majority of farmers adversely affected by these business practices are not dealing with 40 ton death machines, but rather the low-end John Deere products that do little more than an equivalent machine from 30 years ago could do. I'd also be interested to hear how ordinary farm machinery necessitates a codebase as complicated as you purport the JD software to be. The problems these machines have to deal with are not difficult, and were largely solved years ago. I can imagine there are some rather complicated hardware engineering efforts involved, but I'm skeptical that the software component would require anything beyond the skills of an enterprising group of skilled undergrads. I realize embedded dev work in safety critical applications is not so easy, but I nevertheless feel like you're dramatically overstating the complexity.
I'm sure the engineers on these projects are veritably concerned with the safety of their customers, and I don't mean to suggest otherwise. Just keep in mind the considerable imbalance of power between JD (and its engineers) and their farmer customers -- particularly in these types of debates.
edit: upon reading my submission, I came off as a bit of a jerk, and for that I apologize. In my defense, before getting into the software industry, I grew up working on a farm, and as a result am a bit reactionary in the face of any sort of "I'm a big bad developer, these guys are glorified lawn mowers who need to be protected from themselves." lines of reasoning.
At least some of these vehicles can be run without an operator in the cab, they use GPS and a set of waypoints to do their job independently.
edit: I have hopefully fixed all of the places where I incorrectly parsed "worked on software for" as indicating employment.
> They have a real potential to end peoples lives in the event of failure
I hope the lessons[1] learned from the Therac-25 are part of the design. Anything that dangerous needs to have defense in depth. If there are hardware limiters, interlocks, etc adding redundancy to the software check, the risk should be no worse than repairing any other dangerous machinery. Alternatively, if John Deere is relying on the software alone for safety checks - which requires that they (and the OEMs!) write bug-free software - then I don't want to be anywhere near the affected products.
> these tractors do (in testing) fail in spectacular ways.
So it's software only. I'm amazed at the hubris of thinking it's even possible can guarantee a software project large enough to requires a couple hundred engineers that maintain "the largest, most complex codebase [you] have ever interacted with". The very existence of tests failing in "spectacular ways" is evidence that bugs do exist in the software.
> These are not riding lawnmowers.
I'm not aware of anybody that suggested they were.
> They are 30-ton combines, and 20 ton tractors tilling fields
Yes, just like the older combines and tractors that didn't require complicated software.
> Joe Farmer isn't going to have a fucking clue how to repair their software correctly.
This, really, is the key point: the farmers in question *are not trying to repair the software. The only reason it is involved at all is because John Deere the company) chose to add the dependency.
There is definitely defense in depth but, I never said the software was bug-free. :)
Also you're doing the unfortunate thing of associating me as part of John Deere. I'm not. I had a small hand is writing a small part of this software, a long long time ago. I don't give a shit if they sell tractors or not. I don't care if farmers modify the software or not. I don't really have a dog in this fight. I'm just a guy with an opinion who's seen how the sausage is made.
We know that you are just a guy with an opinion. But you could counter the arguments if you still hold the opinion, otherwise you could concede.
> these tractors do (in testing) fail in spectacular ways.
Aren't there any hardware failsafes to prevent the software from controlling the machinery in an unsafe manner?
Hey, I do high-assurance systems too. High-assurance security where input or environment might be malicious. Even in my constraints, the systems are designed so the parts can be replaced without magic software. The big complaint about JD seems to be them using software constructs to prevent fixing tractors or common extensions. The former should not be hard as JD just has to allow products with certain specs for what will work. The second might require a combination of that with a more manual, operating mode with some automation disabled. Less complexity than what JD is putting in there.
So, Im not buying it even if you worked on the team. They could design it for cheap fixes for parts easily. They could allow more extensions than they let on by turning off some automation. They are instead applying the well-tested concept of lockin both with software and their request to copyright office to make mods illegal. This is to increase profit of their near monopolistic dominance of a lot of the market (esp rural areas).
What, specifically, is a threat to kill people in the software? I'm sorry but that just reads like a John Deere shill here to defend the cause. We got by for literally two hundred years without magical software in tractors, and we were just fine.
It's not obvious how an errant piece of large, heavy, machinery could kill someone?
There's a software bug in one of my tractors (not John Deere) where it won't always immediately disengage the clutch when put in gear (yes, even the transmission is fully computerized). One time during a long day in the field I accidentally left it in gear, not noticing because the tractor was at a full stop with no signs of moving. A few minutes after I got out of the cab it decided to kick in. Luckily it was in a low gear and I was able to safely get it stopped, but it's easy to see how that could have ended up tragic. While that one was ultimately my error, without that bug it wouldn't have been an issue in the first place.
I'm sure you can come up with arguments as to why that software shouldn't exist – although I have to say it's wonderful when it works – but it's easy to see why bugs can be dangerous.
What if we compare the number of people involved in producing the same amount of food two hundred years ago and today?
These things drive themselves. There are foragers that follow other equipment autonomously.
It doesn't sound like the farmers are asking to rewrite or replace that software. It sounds like they are just asking to be able to make the same kind of repairs that their local dealer makes.
And what kind of repairs are that? As a software developer I don't understand what equipment is failure needs software change. Software don't wear and tear. Hardware does.
From a different article on this subject [1]:
> "If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."
[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farm...
Thanks. This was the kind of answer I feared
I don't know about tractors, but I do know some examples from cars that might be relevant.
The security system on some cars talks to keys electronically, and relies on a chain of trust between components. Kinda makes sense - you don't want a thief to be able to reach under the car, plug into a cable and issue the unlock doors command. The practical upshot of this is replacement doors won't unlock the central locking, unless you have them installed by the stealership. This happened to my father, when someone reversed into his car in a car park and dented his passenger side door.
The go-to example used by car manufacturers when they want to advocate for this lock-in is 'counterfeit' airbags. You can google and find reports of this sort of thing - authentic-looking airbags selling for $200 when the manufacturer charges $400. Some of them aren't as good as manufacturers' parts - and short of discharging the airbag, buyers have no way to check their quality.
The car manufacturers would then argue that unscrupulous second hand car salesmen might not tell you the car had a non-original airbag.
Looking to the future, in some articles about self-driving cars you'll hear that cars of the future will communicate with one another, allowing drafting between cars at highway speeds, and intersections without traffic lights [1]. If such a system comes to exist, I sure hope bad actors wouldn't be able to remotely crash my car - and I'm sure car manufacturers will use this as an excuse to lock out owner and third party repairs.
The airbag example is an excellent analogy.
All software ships with bugs. Some of them cause real problems, and are patched in the next firmware rev. Farmers (rightfully) resent being held over a barrel in both time and money for fixes that should be part of already owning the machine. For example, if Ford discovers a flaw in their cars' ABS code that is recall-worthy, that's what happens, and Ford, not the customer, foots the bill.
Replace a transmission. It's in tfa.
Let people run their own software. If they kill someone, hold them liable. If deaths become endemic, then consider locking them down.
As many comments on these stories demonstrate, farmers have as much valid reasons to have control over their equipment as John Deere has for preventing it.
Technology is always about trade-offs. It's just that John Deere took things too far.
> If deaths become endemic, then consider locking them down.
As much as I dislike John Deer's strategy, your statement is just stupid. Waiting for people do die before you regulate to make it safer doesn't work. Look at Ford who calculated that saving $x on a component was worth it if only y people die and their relatives sue.
That component you refer to was necessary for the safe usage of the vehicle. If it fails, bad things would happen (and they did).
Having control over your tractor does not necessarily kill people. Death is not inherently implied by farmers merely having access.
Apples and oranges. Equating the two is silly.
Most people won't be adding in gotos and if statements, they'll be replacing borken parts and getting their tractors working again.
Those few who actually do end up writing code for it, and those who opt to run it, will do so with the full knowledge that it'll be their asses on the line when something goes wrong.
Either way, my point was that people won't die from access unless they do something really stupid, and death due to stupidity is going to occur regardless of whether the tractor is locked down or not.
> Those few who actually do end up writing code for it, and those who opt to run it, will do so with the full knowledge that it'll be their asses on the line when something goes wrong.
In a world where extremely dangerous phone chargers are getting bought just because they are cheap, I cannot imagine that your views are correct. People are putting active fire hazards into their homes and other people are building them in full knowledge that the components used are inadequate.
Yes, people should be able to repair their machines and change single components but it should be guaranteed that basic safety functionality is working. I'm not talking about something where a farmer personally modifies their own machine. I'm talking about manufacturers that build cheap replacement parts.
It does and can work.
Source: The aerospace industry
Think about what you just said for a second. "endemic" deaths of innocent people are the litmus test for whether software should be locked down? How is that in any way acceptable?
Traffic accidents happen. According to your reasoning, we should forbid people from owning and driving a car.
No, that is not my reasoning. I'm not talking at all about people operating or using devices that carry inherent danger to themselves or others. I'm specifically responding to the parent's argument about what counts as an acceptable threshold at which it becomes okay to compromise an owner's ability to modify these machines. The parent said that its only acceptable AFTER some nontrivial number of deaths, presumably of people in addition to the owner of the machine.
A related question I want to ask is: what is inherent about software that makes it not okay to have restrictions on modifications where lives other than the owner's may be at stake? I see other comments here that say things like "oh these machines should have mechanical limiters etc. that prevent them from being dangerous." But isn't that essentially the same thing, just implemented in hardware and not software?
I'd like to note that I'm not saying that John Deere is in the right here. I just feel that the argument in the parent comment is, for lack of a better word, inhumane.
My bet is that the few deaths that will initially occur, will be due to stupidity, rather than the ability to fix your property.
If people thought like you did, we wouldn't have kitchen knifes.
> John Deere tractors run on open source software
Out of curiosity, what range of open source licenses appear in the code base? Do they use any software whose license requires source distribution? If so, are you aware of a "source code" page buried in John Deere's website, or some other mechanism by which they satisfy any distribution clauses?
I couldn't possibly comment. This would be close to me breaking NDA ground here, so sorry about that. I know that the legal department took software licensing very seriously and we had a narrow range of licenses we could use.
NDA on open source libraries? Don't those licenses usually require attribution at the very least? Where can we find the license file? Surely JD is complying with license requirements, which would require disclosing the libs used...
I don't think it's fair to assume an ex-employee knows the details of the software licenses or where to find them. If he knows more concrete details (like a link to the license file) I imagine he would share, but otherwise invoking NDA is a safety measure to avoid sharing potentially incorrect/outdated info.
Instead of now even hiding behind some lame excuses like NDAs, how about answering the most asked question:
How does replacing hardware parts does risk lives? Why is the situation different for JD than for eg. car manufacturers?
Sounds like you're talking about the code that handles safety features.
What does that have to do with the code specifically written to force farmers to pay John Deer for maintenance and repairs? The stuff they could normally do themselves?
There is an obvious trend to make simple things complicated. Like how you have to remove the whole front end of a car to change a headlight. This sounds exactly like that.
Actually, that latter is a trend to make things more compact. The engine compartment of my current car, which has the very requirement that you mention, has nowhere near the amount of extra unused volume as the engine compartment of the car that I was driving a couple of decades ago had, permitting access to many components without other components being in the way. The engine compartment is also, itself, smaller overall.
Don't try to bullshit us.
Your code is deliberately user-hostile. Farmers aren't trying to hack their tractors for the sake of it; they need to hack the parts of your code that prevent them from performing routine maintenance. Replacing a fuel pump is not going to turn a tractor into a rampaging death machine.
You are using spurious safety arguments to justify profiteering. Software lock-outs are being used to prop up a business model, just like the chips in printer ink cartridges.
If product owners are given the ability, they will gladly retune the engine software to output more power, and defeat aftertreatment systems, both to the breaking of emissions laws, and the detriment to the environment. It's a tricky business trying to lock down only parts of the software. Once the cat is out of the bag, all bets are off, to mix my metaphors, so manufacturers err on the side of caution. It's not PURELY to screw the customer. ;-)
>Don't try to bullshit us.
Us? Who is "us"? Why are you trying to shout down an opposing view? You want prefer the echo chamber?
>Replacing a fuel pump is not going to turn a tractor into a rampaging death machine.
Am I going to be able to replace whatever parts I want on my Model 3? Because "we" certainly love that company here!
Yes - you can change the windshield wipers, replace the fluid, change the tires. You may not be able to replace the battery or any of the high voltage electrical system yet. Although if you are experienced in high-voltage maintenance, you may be able too. See this[1] description of one fix that your "software" would prevent.
>Yes - you can change the windshield wipers, replace the fluid, change the tires.
Are you unable to change these components on your John Deere vehicle?
FTA:
""Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I'm really in a bad spot,"
Your comparison to Tesla doesn't get better just by repeating it a few times. If your Tesla breaks down you wont have any problem to get a comparable replacement car. Much luck to get a replacement for your tractor during harvest season.
>Your comparison to Tesla doesn't get better just by repeating it a few times
Your hand-waving also does precisely zero.
>If your Tesla breaks down you wont have any problem to get a comparable replacement car
What does this have to do with anything? I want to work on something I bought; isn't that what we're arguing about? The availability of a replacement is a straw man. Why are you apologizing for other companies that do precisely what is being described in the article?
While I think you have a valid point about Tesla's availability, this is a "Tu Coque". I mean, regardless if Tesla does/does not do it, this is considered bad and bringing Tesla in the discussion does not change nor challenge the validity of this view, only, maybe, reveal a little hypocrisy or favoritism in the audience.
>While I think you have a valid point about Tesla's availability, this is a "Tu Coque". I mean, regardless if Tesla does/does not do it, this is considered bad
>reveal a little hypocrisy or favoritism in the audience.
Precisely my point in bringing it up. Someone, who apparently worked at John Deere, offers an opposing view and some clown shouts him down like a bully. Why should anyone listen to the arguments of hypocrites?
If you're against this sort of thing, you're against it.
> Why should anyone listen to the arguments of hypocrites?
Because even though they might be hypocrites the may offer good arguments. And while I understand the point of the JD employee myself (I also work writing software for vehicles) and I think he speaks honestly, I think that goods should be easy to fix and all the means fo this should be at the disposal of whoever needs it. Reconciling safety and the need for open software (because this is what is basically boils down to), right to repair and right to modify is a real issue. One that should not be invalidated necessarily by personal traits of a subset of supporters of either side.
> I want to work on something I bought; isn't that what we're arguing about?
This might be what you are arguing about, but then you are in the wrong discussion. Farmers complain that they have to wait for an authorized JD mechanic to fix even the most simple stuff. And during harvest time they just can't wait.
>but then you are in the wrong discussion
Maybe you are.
>Farmers complain that they have to wait for an authorized JD mechanic to fix even the most simple stuff
Actually, it says in the article that they can fix simple things.
What does any of this have to do with repairing a transmission? You're moving the goal post.
Your post smacks of "PR". The majority of people that I've talked to regarding their tractors have the issue of needing a replacement part and requiring the JD tech to come out and authorize its replacement or fixing every single time. This is just crazy expensive and time consuming.
If you want people to not modify your hardware or software then you make it so easy that the alternative doesn't look good.
How many lines of code does it take to register as the largest you've dealt with? The largest I dealt with took 45 minutes to grab the repo. I don't state that as a point of honor, more like a point in needless over-effort.
I would say the JD's tractor software (if taken in it's entirety) is on par with the modern Linux kernel in size, if not larger. Worse yet, the codebase is spread along many different repositories, teams, and build systems.
I've seen integration builds take days to finish (not including running of unit tests).
Look I get it, John Deere is evil. But this codebase is beyond any one person or team's comprehension. It's very massive, and it's very complicated.
How is possible that a software developed for a very specific purpose is comparable in size to a general purpose OS? I see this as an indication of a bad developed/vastly overcomplicated software. Correct me if you think otherwise.
I've worked at Deere as a contractor. Not on the tractor software as I didn't have access, but I would put most of what I saw as towing the line of over engineered.
There were certainly parts that were exceptionally easy to work with. Many, many, many repos all over the place doing various different things and inside of some of those you would find some very cleanly written code with excellent tests, examples, and documentation. The problem was once those nice little libraries, tools, etc got brought together it became a mess.
Did you see this comment?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14076318
I don't think the customers need or want to modify the software. Just open it up for hardware replacements
All the more reason not to trust it.
You said there were 150-300 engineers working on this code. That is at least an order of magnitude less than the number of people developing Linux.
Yes, but they're getting paid, which is going to easily make up for the larger number of individuals developing Linux. Not to mention that 10x the devs does not come close to 10x the productivity.
For next time: if you don't know how something works (in this case, how linux is developed and by whom), ask! It's better than assuming and jumping to conclusions.
Most linux developers are paid to develop linux. Based on Jonatan Corbets stats less than 15% of the changes could possibly be from volunteers. More than 1200 developers affiliated with ~200 companies contributed to the last release alone. There are nuances here (some developers might not be full time _kernel_ developers) but the argument that linux development isn't professional and mostly paid work has been invalid for years.
Regardless of all the negative feedback this comment has received, this is one of the reasons I find Hacker News to be totally cool.
Where else do you get an engineer who wrote the code commenting on the article in question?
> This software is by FAR the largest, most complex codebase I have ever interacted with.
This is a problem.
Edit: I want to add something.
Serious 3rd party serious mechanical shops have had the ability to intervene on this kind of equipment - I suppose. The same way that independent serious and competent car repair shops exists.
One problem we are about to all observe, and which actually has already began, is not typically that owners would like to rewrite the software and run their car/tractor/whatever with the modified/rewritten version.
The problem is that vendors are taking the dangerousness argument and (mis)using it as an economic weapon in the same time to gain anticompetitive in the maintenance market -- like the comment to which I'm replying to does, in effect (concentrating on the risks of unrelated open changes, instead of discussing the initial problem! )
And moreover in the same time, car vendors, for example, have proven several time we can not trust them with critical software.
Thank you. I work in Ag and it seems crazy that someone should be able to buy a machine like those Deere sells and be able to modify the controls SW. Can United Airlines update the controls SW on Boeing 747? I'm not sure how tractors are any different.
I also work in ag, and own John Deere equipment. Is anyone truly asking for source code? I've read that narrative here and there, but it seems what is really being sought after is access to the tools and manuals that the authorized dealers have access to. The service techs repairing these machines aren't going to be modifying the code either, and they don't need to.
As an aside, I remember the last time I had a John Deere tech out. Even for him to access the service manual (to fix a mechanical part), which was fundamentally not much more than a simple search tool that displays PDFs, required a surprising level of authorization to access each document, with everything encrypted. It seemed a little extreme just to get a simple diagram. I can sort of see why some worry about where the company is headed.
I think documentation is the right way to handle this. Require enough documentation that 3rd party repair shops can fix the machines. Even if they can't do much with the embedded controllers, at least document the sensors and the wiring. Otherwise, these machines are completely useless without the manufacturer and their dealers.
Can confirm that United Airlines directly employs aircraft mechanics who are free to service as they see fit, and they use hardware that is not DRM'd to the plane.
Can also confirm that aircrafts can do more damage than tractors if things go wrong.
Like the JDs in the article that are so complex that they can steer themselves, aircrafts also do this!
I don't see how tractors are any different either. So JD should cut out this rent-seeking bullshit and stop pretending it's in the best interest of anybody other than their shareholders.
From all the articles that I have read, the repairs of the United Airlines planes are heavily regulated. The mechanics can't replace a part with another unless the new part is certified, and certification is very expensive. The mechanics also have to be certified and fill a lot of paperwork.
The changes checks are not enforced by software, but by strict FAA rules.
United Airlines is not really farmer Joe and something tells me that even United Airlines doesn't send its 747 to Boeing for all the maintenance work...
Wow the public relations sock-puppetry on HN is getting very clever and sophisticated. I really love the green account - nice touch. It really helps your authenticity to pretend like you are afraid of retribution from John Deere when you are totally kissing their asses.
Let me ask you this -- why in the world do the lines of software you write prevent a qualified mechanic from changing a transmission? You know people used to do that all the time when tractors had zero lines of software in them.
After all you are trying to very cleverly change the subject here. You are doing it very deftly, as you should, because you are not a software developer, you are a PR drone and it is your job to deftly change the subject.
The question here is not about the quality of the John Deere software, so it does not really matter how many engineers worked on it or how hard they worked on it. The problem is that the John Deere software takes away an essential right of property ownership that people take for granted.
No one is accusing the JD software of being faulty, i.e., incapable of serving it's intended purpose. People are accusing the software of having nefarious purposes and serving them all too well.
Not on either side here, but I feel like you're missing the point there. Let's say someone does modify the code, then the machine messes up and ends up killing someone. Who would be the culprit there? I guess they could have something that detects when the software is modified, but even if they did, I bet it would still be poor publicity for them (similar to when people misuse Tesla's assist and getting in accidents).
Also, honest question here about changing transmission. You make it sound as if it's completely unrelated with the code, but is it? The code may very well be tuned for the hardware as it is, and changing any of it could also lead to unexpected results.
Of course there's much better ways of going about it, but from a lawsuit protection perspective, I think you're simplifying an issue which is much more complex than it may seem at the surface.
Both the OP and the reply seem a bit over-the-top, but it's a fair call to say that the goal was changing the subject from "who owns the tractor" to "think of the children!"
People repair stuff they own all the time, and if they do a bad job of it, they are liable for any damages caused. All that's really needed here is some clear way to indicate that this factory-issued X has been modified by the owner to be an X1 model. End of story.
We can't continue down this path of people developing software and somehow in the process picking up vast quantities of physical goods that buyers think they actually own. Not only is it evil, it's nonsensical from the viewpoint of the average informed person. The only reason it's worked as long as it has is that most people aren't informed enough about it. Tractors might be the straw that breaks the camel's back on this issue. People don't think much about the inner workings of their phones, but Joe Farmer fixing his tractor is a concept most folks don't have difficulty getting their head around.
>Let's say someone does modify the code.
Let's not. These farmers don't want to change the software. They only want to fix their hardware.
And because of the close tightness with the software, they can't.
Do you think I can pull the electric motor from my Model S to replace it?
When John Deere does this, HN is up in arms. When Tesla does it, it's part of an "innovative business model".
As someone in the car repair industry I can assure you that Teslas hostility regarding non-authorised-repair is a big issue and will only blow up when Teslas become more common. At least here in Europe, this won't fly.
I think if you had the part and replaced it, your car would turn on without a Tesla engineer recertifying it.
>your car would turn on without a Tesla engineer recertifying it
I think you're going to be disappointed.
> Let's say someone does modify the code, then the machine messes up and ends up killing someone. Who would be the culprit there?
People repair and modify their cars every day - and these are driven on public roads among other drivers and pedestrians. Farm equipment is operated on private property and among workers who are mostly aware of the risks. In the end, if the vehicle is unsafe, the driver is responsible.
No.
JD is a knife manufacturer who puts countermeasures to prohibit knives owners from sharpening second side of the blade (among others things). Because it can be dangerous.
It sounds like you can't sharpen the first side either. Or more aptly, replace the handle of the knife when it gets worn.
Most of the folks on HN haven't worked on anything more complicated than a web app.
I'm pretty sure prior versions had no software. Adding software without showing exactly what that software does seems more dangerous than trying to handle everything without explaining how it is handled.
I mean, it used to work like X. Now it works like Y. Which you could inspect via the code. The reality is it works like ?. Because only god and the parent throwaway know.
Although that comment is unconstructive and probably wrong, I'll just point out that pretty much all of Google is a "web app".
While I agree it seems the above comment was intended as a swing at HN which is not constructive or useful debate, I would suggest that as per the stack overflow developer survey web programmer was the most common job title by a very large margin (72.6%, with next closest being Desktop applications developer at 28.9%)
While I would suggest that this forum demographic likely differs somewhat from stack overflow as a whole, its certainly an interesting question.
Also as an anecdote, web technologies stories seem to appear disproportionately often on the front page. This would suggest at least some interest by the majority of HN
Among the most successful cars were those with straightforward replacement parts, a defacto standard, and reasonably well documented and available maintenance manuals.
Tesla wants control over this, by literally renting the maintenance manual, and remotely disabling the car if repairs or parts aren't authorized. I don't expect the model 3 market will appreciate this business model. It will be a much more price sensitive market compared to the early models which has been relatively inelastic for repairs and resale.
Consider the x86 computer market, if every component had signed firmware, and the main system verified this signature in case of component replacement, and would fail to function at all if signature verification failed. What a pain...
Consider voting machines, proprietary hardware, expensive to design, maintain, audit, and go obsolete in as few as 1/2 dozen uses. Compare that to pencil and paper.
The older I get the more Darth Vader I become: "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." (Let's say the Force is common sense in this metaphor.)
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13925994 (177 comments)
This really reminds me of how Richard Stallman started GNU. It was because he can't modify the software on a printer he uses.
And the Pro-corporate shills would say "What if he made printer into a ink bomb? we should respect the right of manufacturer to offer printer as a service".
This kind of blind slavery to ideology of blind market instead of intelligent systems to provide the best outcomes in a information era is only setting back innovation.
All software should be free as in freedom of speech at the very least. And I say as automation progresses, and material needs of society can be fulfilled freely, it should also be free as in free beer.
While this is a fascinating question in the context of tractors, it gets even more interesting in the context of cars, houses, personal electronics, light bulbs. The First Sale Doctrine is being eroded by DRM.
The problem with DRM is the early internet era community wasted all of its screaming and yelling about stealing movies and MP3's, and now anytime you mention DRM in a context that matters like those, it's ignored.
I really should have said "is being eroded by DMCA"
It's not just the farmer paying for this: it's everyone who eats food.
The time wasted is lost productivity. The extra fees just for a software unlock is lost money. The farmer has to either charge more, or go out of business sooner. Either way, the cost of food rises.
The only problems is that the creators of those software did not get their food and tools for free.
Was that also lost productivity?
Maybe we could fix it by giving everything for free!
Every time I read or hear about new developments in creating safer/more secure software, I am reminded of scenarios like this. Companies could use formally verified crypto and such to provably and completely lock out users by destroying all means of circumvention. In that sense, I think these secure technologies are like nuclear weapons --- extremely powerful, too powerful. Society in general seems to rely on some insecurity to maintain its freedom; so I believe anyone who advocates for more secure systems should also carefully consider all the negative effects which will appear if their vision comes true, and whether they are, however indirectly, locking themselves out.
That first thing you said was what Trusted Computing Group was all about but with whitelisting & chips instead of perfect crypto. Such things were fought well but App Stores succeeded. For "security" reasons, hardware support will show up in products that incidentally reinforce the DRM parts. Good news is vendors keep differentiating on increased control of product & ASIC costs means there's usually debug hardware in it to tap into. ;)
It seems so unbelievable to me that there are enough people that are a) John Deere equipment owners/renters and b) capable of debugging and patching issues in a C++ codebase for these stories to keep appearing.
Debates on the virtues of open source aside, is this actually the solution? Or is it a symptom of, say, poor quality software releases? or service visits that are too costly? or overloaded dealers who can't handle harvest-time support loads? I just don't believe that allowing people to tinker with the software is going to be the magic answer that these folks seem to think it is.
> It seems so unbelievable to me that there are enough people that are a) John Deere equipment owners/renters and b) capable of debugging and patching issues in a C++ codebase for these stories to keep appearing.
There doesn't have to be any overlap between these groups of people. The issue here seems to be that some mechanical parts that are easily replaced, are not accepted by the controlling computer, unless it is authorized using specific administration software. Basically, ink cartridge lock-in, but for tractors.
To circumvent the restrictions, no farmer has to know C++, they only need a pirated version of the software to integrate the replacement parts into the system. So what the farmers want is not the ability to arbitrarily modify the software running on their equipment, but simply a way to do purely mechanical repairs on their own.
As a software developer and farmer (and owner of some John Deere equipment), it doesn't seem that unbelievable to me. I know quite a few farmers who also work in tech. The capital intensive nature of the business means that many come from other high paying professions, of which tech jobs tend to be among, to support the habit.
Although from everything I have read on the subject, source code does not really seem to be what people are after. They just want to have equal access to manuals and tools that the authorized dealers have. The guy in the service truck isn't modifying source code either.
You underestimate the resourcefulness of farmers and the tenacity of reverse-engineers. To those who do it, I bet this is a lot more fun than cracking simple licensing protections on a software.
The motherboard/vice article NPR is blatantly ripping off here is much better in my opinion.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farm...
"farmers could damage the machines, like bypassing pollution emissions controls to get more horsepower."
Isn't this the problem with warranties? People could try to mod it, end up damaging it and try to get it replaced with warranties.
I also don't fully understand this software. Is it just completely vendor locked? That sounds really unreasonable. It should allow for at least basic debugging and trouble shooting.
Is this software locking only in large $100k + harvester type equipment? Does the vendor have other reasonable explanation of doing this?
I wonder if the software designer for this equipments would have reasonable arguments for such locks or if this is just profit driven decision.
Can confirm it's usually proprietary and locked. An old roommate is employed by an implement manufacturer--his sole job is traveling the western united states, making housecalls to upload newer versions of control software to equipment. They absolutely DO NOT trust the owners to do it themselves.
This has pretty frightening implications for the state of consumer goods, if industrial goods are already going this direction.
Consumer electronics have been disposable for 25 years now. You don't exactly see an electronics repair shop in every town anymore.
Or even basic electrical appliances. I have a toaster, a kettle and a vacuum which are all bricked because of peripheral failures - two poorly (deliberately..?) designed mechanical switches and a charger - which in many cases would cause the whole otherwise functional appliance to be junked. Only somewhat resourceful and stubborn folk like myself bother to fix these things themselves.
"This has pretty frightening implications for the state of consumer goods, if industrial goods are already going this direction."
This scenario has played out thousands of times in the manufacturing/industrial sector over the past 30 years. The end result is that the vendor trying to lock their customers in to a service contract loses out to whoever makes a remotely comparable product that isn't locked in within a decade. The sales generated by virtue of being the "non-bullshit" vendor far outweigh the profits associated by following the market leader into the world of walled gardens.
Except the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The issue is that any open version of a product has to compete in such a way that matches the buy cycle of the product. I don't imagine farmers buy new combines every year! These things has to work for decades! Ditto with a lot of idustrial machinery.
> Except the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
This applies solely to stock market speculation, due to a perfect amalgamation of human psychological biases and fallacies.
In consumer economics we use utility value (iirc, it's been far too long since I've opened a textbook). Consumers will definitely drop their JD's if a "no-bullshit," almost as good option comes along, because the utility value gained will be higher than the asset loss.
This assumes consumers actually rationally assess the value and don't value emotional brand attachments.
We're talking about farmers, not porn viewers. We not only can assume they're rational, but have spreadsheets for financial modeling and a dedicated capital expenditures budget. And if they don't do any of these, it would be easier to buy them out and replace them with someone who does.
I'm not sure people are worried about the warranties - if you mod your gear the warranty is no longer valid - no great problem. The problem is they don't want you to modify your equipment ever regardless of whether it's under warranty or not.
Environmental concerns is one of the two big reasons I would accept non-user-servisable hardware/software, second reason being safety of others (think people modding self-driving software in cars).
Because the minute an easily applicable patch that makes tractors do more for less, but with more pollution becomes available, a lot of people will apply it. Diesel cars already have this problem with particle filters.
It's not just companies that are greedy and want to profit off externalities; so are many (most?) people, especially when incentivized by financial pressures.
It is usually 100% proprietary, think of iOS devices and game consoles
forget damage the [million dollar] machine". an incorrectly modded component could, rather easily, kill or maim the operator. John Deere may not have authorized the component/root cause of the death, but you know they're gonna get dragged to court anyway
This seems to be a regular way to lock in customers, I think of ink jet cartridges and even 3d printer refills use similar tricks. I wonder if there is a case to be made in making this illegal or optional
There's going to be a huge market in used pre-DRM heavy machinery. The purely mechanical/hydraulic versions of this stuff is virtually indestructible, with a little maintenance.
I'll gladly pay the cost of a John Deere mechanic from time to time before I go back to the purely mechanical tractors we used to have on the farm.
When I hear this kind of comment I have to wonder if: 1. The person has never spent time in a tractor. 2. Has never spent time in a modern tractor. 3. Has never spent time in an old tractor.
What're the benefits of newer models in terms of daily usage?
Comfort. In the grain business my tractors don't get anywhere near daily usage, but when their window of usefulness opens, the days are long and the longer you can handle keeping the machine rolling the better.
Not all of the advancements are directly related to computers, but they sort of come part and parcel at this point.
Gotcha, thanks
People buy software-controlled tractors in the first place because they really want the software functions. If purely mechanical versions could fill the same need, DRMed tractors would never have sold to begin with.
I don't like the idea that we have to pass laws to force companies to make a better product. Why can't a company take the initiative and grab all the customers who value this?
> Why can't a company take the initiative and grab all the customers who value this?
You make it sounds so easy to start a tractor company.
I didn't say start one, there are lots of existing companies, perhaps someone with a lower market share could try it.
They don't have the capital and market share to innovate the way the current monopoly (Deere) has. As long as our government is ran by lobbyist awarding the rich, competition will remain a myth.
Your comment reads like someone who believes there is a free market. I don't think most Americans realize lobbyist are the opposition and their sole purpose is to ensure a free market does not exist in their respective industry.
I was going to point to free market and libertarian but I didn't want to incite politic.
But yeah, many people that believe in this, thinks it's simple.
One example is my buddy who thinks automation is good and don't account the people who are displaced by it. When press for what he would do for these people. It took 20 minute for him to say: 1. charity 2. community 3. family to help those people. He also counter that because there's less worker due to automation their wages would rise. Articles have shown that their wages would do the opposite actually. But notice there is no government safety net for these people.
It's quite interesting.
If you want this free market, you want your country labor force to run at maximum. So in my opinion, free market people, should at least support some social safety net to transition these people into a new labor sector.
In general this free market thing isn't some law that came about from nature. It's a human invention... so the fear of having more laws or laws being abuse is crazy.
I am incline to believe these people are arm chair economists, just like myself, but with more faith in this mystical concept of free market.
The result of a free market is that the better products will always win out. By your logic your statement could just have easily as been "to start a car company" or "to start a rocket company" or "to start a computer company". These are all examples of industries whose existing players were supplanted by a better idea with smart, passionate and dedicated entrepreneurs.
> The result of a free market is that the better products will always win out.
Just two words, capital costs, suffice to throw that entire line of thought to the ground.
It's a huge barrier to market entry effectively making for a natural monopoly. In farm equipment it's John Deere and Caterpillar and they don't have that much overlap product wise these days.
If you go through the long list of farming equipment companies, they're all gone now. Defunct, or conglomeration.
> In farm equipment it's John Deere and Caterpillar
Caterpillar? In agriculture? Do you mean Challenger (AGCO) or CLAAS, both of whom have used Caterpillar branding at points in the past? Although neither of them have recently.
Curiously, you're the second person to have mentioned Caterpillar being involved in agriculture in this discussion. Which surprises me. They are not a player at all, outside of some overlap use of their industrial products (skidsteers, payloaders, etc.)
Yes they explicitly target that market. http://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry.html
Agriculture is a broad market, not limited to plows and combines which are more specific and that's where JD is at. Like I said, not much overlap.
Yes, like I said, they sell their segment of industrial equipment that is also useful in agriculture to people involved in agriculture. Your link echoes that. It's also small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Why are you putting them ahead of big players in agriculture like CNH and ACGO? In fact, Massey Ferguson (ACGO) is considered to have the largest tractor band in the world.
At some point anti-trust should kick in, regardless of the origin of the monopoly, the theory behind anti-trust is to protect the consumer
This is so clearly fictional I find it difficult to argue not because you are not mistaken but because there is such a huge divide in our understanding of the world. Its as if we were discussing world affairs and you brought up the possible influence of astrology.
Economics isn't a great description of reality. Its a just so story that is made to make sense after the fact because it lacks the predictive power that defines science.
Messy, stupid, corrupt, emotional, irrational complicated is the rule as opposed to the exception in real life.
For instance no such animal as the free market you describe exists. Just because hard/impossible to repair tractors is a bad thing doesn't mean that anyone is inspired to fix this, that such a company would succeed in the fact of competition ethical and not so ethical.
The extremely probable failure of such an effort doesn't imply that the world wouldn't be a better place if this was so and so if this is important it falls on us as citizens to outline to the players what is acceptable and not via regulation.
The result of a free market is that the better products will always win out. Then if the firms behind those products are well-run, they will use the dominant market position their products have granted them to try to raise barriers to entry and smother upstart competitors in their crib.
"Car company" and "rocket company" are interesting examples, since the "smart, passionate and dedicated entrepreneurs" in those areas needed billions in government subsidies to get off the ground []. And "computer company" includes the software side, with its low capital costs, and the hardware side, where the competitors are firmly entrenched (what's the last laptop/desktop upstart to hit it big?).
[] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-2015...
> The result of a free market is that the better products will always win out.
That is patently incorrect. There are many examples of market failures that produce incorrect, poor quality, or even predatory results. A recent example is the total disregard for security in many (most?) "IoT" products, and the market for lemons[1] is the canonical example of a market that specifically selects for bad results ("lemons"). Note that the latter example of markets not producing "better products" was worth a Nobel Prize.
In a truly free market, the product that is most efficient for the market wins. This is often (but not always) the most profitable product. Sometimes it may also be the "best" product, depending on your point of view, because profit (or price) is not the only metric that is used in determining which product is "best".
Tesla (the "car company") and SpaceX (the "rocket company") should be forever banned from discussions about the awesomeness of free market, because they're outliers. They're driven by a person with clear goals for the actual change of the world conditions, and companies themselves are used only as best available tools to achieve those goals. This is as far from your typical companies and entrepreneurs as one can get.
"Why can't a company take the initiative and grab all the customers who value this?"
They are, that's why companies like Kubota are expanding their US-based manufacturing capacity like crazy. Capital equipment like a Harvester or practically anything above credit card expense level industrial equipment is purchased on a "make or break" level of decision making. Brand inertia can only carry a company like John Deere so long before the competition eats their lunch. Remember, this is a recent (past ~5 years) development in a market where equipment is expected to last ~10 years or longer. The next time these farmers decide to buy a piece of capital equipment, I guarantee they buy the unrestricted option.
You must not know any farmers or ranchers. John Deere gets more love than Ford, Chevy, and Dodge combined. I haven't ever met someone who has sat in a tractor without a positive opinion of this company.
Agriculture is a very technical industry, so most of these people are quite well-educated, but that education doesn't usually include software. As soon as someone in this field wraps their head around DRM and its consequences, they are likely to fight it hard, but getting to that point takes a little more explanation than it does for you or me.
In the grand scheme of things, at least in the short term, advertising "no DRM" isn't likely to make a dent in John Deere's market share.
> I haven't ever met someone who has sat in a tractor without a positive opinion of this company.
Then you must not know very many farmers or ranchers because Case IH(formerly International) vs. Deere is a very big thing in those circles. It is very much a rivalry with typically no overlap much like the Ford/Chevy/Dodge rivalries.
There is a fair amount of competition in this space. Around me, I see a lot of Kubota, New Holland, etc. Not too many John Deeres actually.
> Around me, I see a lot of Kubota, New Holland, etc. Not too many John Deeres actually.
Around Iowa I see these brands as well, but I don't see Kubota and New Holland as being as massive and innovative as Deere and Cat are/can be. John Deere has been notorious in the legal system in its pursuit of these locks on software. They have very good autonomy software which gets better every season, and distinguishes them from Kubota and New Holland. Their autonomy seems to be up-and-coming, but isn't in primetime just yet.
What area of the country are you in? I wonder if it is more of a geographic difference in brand choice, or if John Deere doesn't handle the local crops in your area as well.
I'm in N.E. Ohio, just outside the Cleveland metro area. The croplands here aren't at large as what you'd see in central OH, but plot sizes of around a hundred acres aren't too hard to spot.
That's a good point that autonomy could be a big deal for some consumers, and I bet larger plot size is a factor in that.
It's definitely easier with a large plot of land. Iowa is largely setup on a 1 mile by 1 mile grid of roads, making plots of 640 acres. I don't know if the grid of gravel roads is common or not.
I've heard of John Deere being able to stay within about an inch of the previously traveled path on subsequent passes through the field. "Guaranteeing" you won't drive over previously planted crops and being able to customize the spraying, doing most driving autonomously,and collect yield per acre in real-time during harvesting, etc. make it a compelling solution out here.
Kubota and New Holland dominate the southeast in my experience. I've even seen several John Deere dealers convert over to other lines recently.
Barriers to entry + capital costs.
Liability laws are in dire need in the software industry. Security for instance would not be such an abysmal disaster if companies were held liable for the insecure garbage they are pumping out.
Indeed. No one should hire a programmer except that they be licensed and bonded, just like any other form of skilled labor.
Users of software developed by unlicensed programmers should also be held liable if their machines should be compromised and used in a botnet or other malicious activity. That means no Linux or, in your case, BSD.
Just attach liability to a sale taking place.
I wonder, is the a GPL tractor software project out there yet?
I don't know, but there is an open source tractor design:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/LifeTrac
Primitive but think of Linux when it was released.
It's part of the Global Village Construction Set, open source machines that could make up the technological basis for a civilization:
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Constructio...
Is it self bootstrapping?
So, we have: 1) Blackbox on-board computers, probably dozens of subtle configuration variations 2) Blackbox binary-only, possibly obfuscated firmware 3) Possibly TiVo-ized runtime. 4) Farmers as the ones who'd possibly be interested. 5) Then, manufacturers could sue for various DMCA violations
I'd say the odds of this happening would be some 1e-3 a year.
This is a policy issue that shouldn't be attacked technically. Better get the farmer write their Congress members.
Couldn't they organize and sue the manufacturer for their losses due to the tractor malfunctions in critical periods and being prevented to service them promptly? I understand it's a bit naive, but you don't solve this by hacking around the problem, but by attacking the problem through the institutions of the system.
The jet engines in a modern airplane have some analogies here. You can think of an engine as a PaaS (Propulsion-as-a-Service). A tractor is HaaS (Harvesting-as-a-Service). Our technologies have reach this level of complexity - the must be offered as a service. Cars will soon be Mobility-as-a-Service. Putting on my economist hat, I'd say that it is the ultimate manifestation of "comparative advantage". If JD abuses their monopoly position, then fix that through the courts and legislation, or by buying a competitors product. Don't try to hack the terms of service. But JD and other "product" vendors need to make it clear that they are in fact selling a service.
Many people do not want to buy things as a service, they want to buy and own something that was built correctly the first time, and if not, is supported for the reasonable lifetime of the product for the cost stated upfront, and can be supported by people outside the company out of their pocket after that.
This as a service model is not inherent to the complexity, it's usually a cash grab.
But in an open capitalists society, such rent-seeking will be resisted by the market and by the law. A vendor has every right to make their offering a service. Unless, of course, they are abusing their monopoly position. IBM was taken to court for this in 1969.
SmartTV and other appliances are closed too, so that users must purchase a new one when for example codecs become obsolete. Sadly, the closed source model is not just being used where there are safety concerns involved.
The big boys have obviously cornered the market. Is there any farming equipment company that provides more open access for maintenance and repairs? If not, why not? It seems there is an opportunity there.
Can someone please explain what software has to do with repairing a tractor?
Edit: it looks like the physical components themselves are DRMed? Wtf?
I'm starting to wonder if these articles are driven by a PR firm paid by John Deere's competition. They're always about John Deere and only John Deere. Aside from the Motherboard / Vice article, they never provide any specifics about the maintenance or repair operations that farms are prevented from doing on their own.
With the Vice article, 2 of the 3 things they mention are modifying the tractors to operate in ways the manufacturer did not intend which could result in damage.
John Deere has a crazy high market share overall...Close to 80%. And it goes up as you move up market to larger, more expensive models.
I think it's just the same reason Google bashing is more prevalent than Bing bashing.
Based on some poking around, it appears that the focus is mainly on John Deere because it's mainly John Deere imposing these software restrictions.
Relevant thread on The Combine Forum (because that's a thing, apparently):
http://www.thecombineforum.com/forums/31-technology/239314-w...
Yep.
That's also because their software is crazy advanced. Basically automates the whole plowing and such. Big market differentiator.
>They're always about John Deere and only John Deere. Aside from the Motherboard / Vice article, they never provide any specifics about the maintenance or repair operations that farms are prevented from doing on their own.
John Deere essentially is the entire market for these machines. Especially in the US.
Case IH has a decent foothold in the US, not anywhere near John Deere but it's there. Unfortunately, they're pulling the same bullshit from what I can tell - it's to the point where farmers that aren't part of a co-op or running a large commercial operation where equipment is leased or replaced regularly it's impractical to use new equipment should it break down.
I'd like to see some concrete examples as well. What kind of repairs are you unable to do?
I've had the same thought. It's such a niche issue and really it's incredibly standard for any kind of business hardware, which is what tractors are. Also nobody's being forced to buy new tractors, there's tons of old tractors still out and running and working every day.
So why do these articles appear with such regularity?
(To be clear I think that all software should be open source and vendors should charge for support, but that's beside the point here.)
You sure nobody is being forced to buy new ones? That would be true if new ones offer no competitive advantage. If there is an advantage, then farmers trying to increase output or reduce cost might have to go for new tractors.
> Also nobody's being forced to buy new tractors, there's tons of old tractors still out and running and working every day.
There are also fewer every day.
It's true but I would wager independent farmers are more likely to repair and keep old tractors around, or buy used when they do have to buy one.
I bet the biggest buyer of new tractors are the farming conglomerates, and I wonder if they're behind these articles. Trying to get a grass roots movement going to push John Deere to change these practices?
You'd be surprised how long old, robust vehicles live for. I don't have any clear data for tractors, but older trucks that can be repaired with minimum tooling get used and re-used in places in Africa, almost to no end.
This is not so relevant for modern agriculture, but my family still has the Valmet 361D tractor my father bought in 1963. It runs as good as ever. The diesel engine needed to have the cylinder tubes replaced some 30 years ago, and other mechanical parts do wear out and are replaced, but this thing isn't going to be out of use because of software issues.
It's too small to be very useful in modern farming, though.
The only reason why things are scrapped is when the price of repairing starts to exceed the value of the product. In places where labor is cheaper and products are more expensive, you see more of a repair culture. Cars is one of those examples - if you've got some basic repair skills, you can keep a car running for a long time. Getting or making parts can be challenging, but not unsolvable. The problem of course is that a lot of work is done by garages or repairmen, who will charge an hourly rate relative to the standard of living here. or something.
Ergo, if a repair costs $1000 for a car worth $1000 it's not worth it, if that same repair costs just $100 it is.
What's ironic is most of these farmers are republicans and voted in the people who enable this crap.
Everybody likes to feel taken advantage of.
If I was a business owner or engineer that built systems this complex and you asked me to not lock it down, I'd call you freaking crazy.
These are very expensive and complex machines, and you want my competition or some farmer who has no idea what he's doing to access and modify it?
No thank you.
Google keeps proprietary code. And that's for auto complete...
You address two different issues here competition and users.
In the case of users you have no right after sale to feel a right to control how your users make use of your product. Just because software and contracts give you two venues to potentially do so doesn't mean it would be rational to allow you to. The world is 99.99% users.
On the second point, competition has always quite legally taken apart the competitors products to see how they tick. If you have something truly innovative you can file a patent, if not then you have nothing that deserves protection.
No, In this case I have complete right to control how my users make use of my product because we agreed to it. It might not be rational because I might lose to an open competitor, but that's a completely different subject.
There's trade secrets at every company in existence that they don't share with their competition. They can't patent them, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve protection. Companies exist because they don't give up how they work to their competition...
Properly we limit what you are allowed to contract away all the time. This isnt any different. You want to retain control see leasing.
Regarding trade secrets you misunderstand them. Please see
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/trade_secret
The Uniform Trade Secrets Act ("UTSA") defines a trade secret as: information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to or readily ascertainable through appropriate means by other persons who might obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy
There are two basic situations in which obtaining the use of a trade secret is illegal; where it is acquired through improper means, or where it involves a breach of confidence. Trade secrets may be obtained by lawful means such as independent discovery, reverse engineering, and inadvertent disclosure resulting from the trade secret holder's failure to take reasonable protective measures.
Anything that can be gleaned from tearing your product to pieces that isn't suitable for patenting gets zero protection.
I understand they don't get legal protection. That's not my point. My point is that companies don't just dump out information on how they operate. They protect their trade secrets, which as the definition you provided says, are worthy of protection. Thanks.
I would argue that the consumers right to have access to a lot of that information is considered normal and is vastly more important that the companies need to protect it. Enough so that we ought to legally protect the consumer even at the expense of the company. After all there are more of us than them why shouldn't we protect ourselves?
The law you cited seems to do that. Companies have no right to stop consumers from purchasing goods that use their trade secrets without their consent.
Imagine not so long in the future if self-driving cars were forced to reveal their code because of the right-to-repair bill, 1. who without a vast depth of knowledge in C++, etc. would be able to go anywhere near it? 2. even if they did is it in their best interest or anyone else's if they tinker with the code and made the car take undesirable actions?
Maybe buying a tractor should be replaced with leasing tractors, if they never want you to fully own everything in it. I think very soon there will be more and more of a need for a new way to determine what products are allowed to be sold partially with a secret OEM key.
There's already plenty of hardware components A) that non-domain experts would have no idea how to repair and B) with would it be potentially hazardous to meddle (e.g. a botched brake repair). I'm not really sure how software presents a substantially different risk.
There's also a reasonable middle ground: vehicles will run unsigned code, but running software not signed by the manufacturer transfers all liability to the vehicle owner in case of bugs and/or malfunction. Third-party maintainers can provide signed builds and contractually agree to cover the same (allowing repair/maintenance even if the original manufacturer stops providing it).
Your car is full of things only an expert could reasonably be expected to tinker with because it is somewhat open a wide range of such people are available to fix it. If they screw it up your massive chunk of rolling death may roll over someones baby.
The circumstances are in no way new and don't merit new rules or expectations. What is actually new is increasing legal and technical roadblocks to self repair that enable manufacturers to design hardware that is worse for nearly everyone and better for their bottom line.
These markets are full of entrenched players who all have an financial incentive to make anti consumer choices so expecting a free market fix is probably laughable. The only real solution is the hated "regulation" where we seek individuals who are subject matter experts without financial incentives to dictate that people must do what is best for everyone rather than their bonus.
Well, modification of certain software systems could be easily regulated. Even now you can't just modify all the mechanical parts of your car. For example, if you remove or bypass your catalytic converter, you can be fined $2,500-200,000 and charged with a felony. There's also a provision for any citizen to sue you into compliance if they know you've done it.
Doubt that happens much, but if you ever became someone the gov't doesn't like, they can probably just go see if your muffler is up to code. Or any of the million other felonies you might be unknowingly committing due to the expansion of federal regulations.
They lock down the software in their well understood interests:
- vendor lock in (this is not good for customers)
- safety (testing this stuff is expesive and lengthy. Every change forces a re-test. They are liable for this stuff)
- defending the brand value (if there is an accident because of modified software non-hackers will blame the manufacturer for making it possible)
This all weill get worse with neural networks:
Imagine people poking around bits in the matrix representing the neural network of the sel-driving AI.
They will not have the slightest clue what they are doing, but they don't want their System to be locked down. They download "steering optimizers" and similar stuff from sites and overwrite the neural network.
Who will be to blame for the accident because of this?
With neural networks even the manufacturer cannot completely understand every nauron's effect on the complete system, as opposed to traditional software. Manufacturers have huge responsibility, and curently only locking software down is their only way to defend themselves.
You are arguing for accepting lockdowns on tractors so that john deere can screw their customers harder based on the safety of systems that don't exist yet. Drivers who cause accidents will end up liable just as they are now.
Except for self driving stuff I was arguing about. We are not yet sure who will be liable for them. Also there is pretty much self driving in some agricultural machines, for use on the fields.
But seeing this topic I'd make it possible for farmers to mod their machinery, with a complete loss of warranty.
Imagine a modded component accidentally sending false or misleading data on the CAN bus, or not yielding the bus, or simply being incompatible with a component. These scenarios can cause serious troubles.
These stuff are not JS frameworks, a page reload does not undo a bad trial and error round.
Also the supporting tools are expensive not only for farmers and machine shos, but also for vendors. I remember the price tags for calibrated instruments from my time in automotive industry...
You can't void the warranty unless the modification/repair results in the damage we already made a law for this even.
When we buy a piece of software, we own and "physically" posses a binary which we feel we can rightly take apart, modify, and mess with it because we view it as analogous to owning a toaster or stereo in the physical world. It's in our home, we can touch it, and we in essence control it.
Now the same is never said for software as a service. We buy subscriptions to services all the time but don't demand an ability to modify or control the software. It's defined in our agreement. Now it seems to me that the companies that sell these tractors have decided to pursue a model by which their software is more or less SaSS (providing encrypted updates over the air). Why is it that these farmers believe they have a right to modify that software?
> Why is it that these farmers believe they have a right to modify that software?
Because a farmer in the middle of a harvest can't afford to 'wait in line' until the manufacturer or the dealership has time to send someone over to make a repair.
I've lived in a farming area and had a pretty good machine shop as well as a ton of welding gear and it didn't take long before farmers knew where to find me in case of a problem just to temporarily fix the issues they would encounter to be properly taken care of once the harvest is in.
The weather waits for nobody and losing a crop because of equipment failure can put a farmer out of business.
Right to repair.
The best outcome of all this nonsense could be that manufacturers of capital goods such as tractors are by law required to fully document what they sell including schematics, board lay-outs and source code or even a reproducible build package.
Rather than adding laws, another good market-driven outcome would removing any laws that inhibit a healthy industry in providing plug-in replacement kits for the brains of the tractor. Yes, official warranties would be voided, so new providers of warranty services would spring up.
Every aspect of this is hypothetical and most likely imaginary. Can you provide example's of similar situations that have played out like this?
Well the engine rechipping industry is somewhat similar.
But indeed, this is hypothetical - but maybe more likely than the OP's desired outcome that "manufacturers of capital goods such as tractors are by law required to fully document what they sell including schematics, board lay-outs and source code or even a reproducible build package."
Why is it that farmers don't have a right to modify and fix equipment that they purchased in 2017 because some software they didn't ask to be installed on their equipment prevents them from doing what they've been able to do for generations?
Up until a few years ago, farmers used to be able to buy farm equipment with the understanding that they could fix it whenever issues arose and didn't need a gatekeeper to come fix their hardware.
I suspect the main reason is that it makes economic sense to most farmers to keep buying the tractors, despite the gatekeeper.
Sucks, but there you go. If they managed (as a group) not to buy the tractors, the gatekeeper would go away.
>because some software they didn't ask to be installed on their equipment
Are you sure about this?
From the article:
today's tractors are high-tech machines that can steer themselves by GPS, you also need a software key — to fix the programs that make a tractor run properly
So - its not the same as the tractors they purchased a few years ago.
Maybe they didn't buy the tractor specifically for those features or maybe you can't even buy a tractor today without those features, but they probably knew what they were getting into before they bought it. Its not a great situation for farmers who don't want those extra bells and whistles but it is what it is.
>Now it seems to me that the companies that sell these tractors have decided to pursue a model by which their software is more or less SaSS (providing encrypted updates over the air).
Did you read the article? It doesn't say anything about hacking any SaSS at all. Or about " encrypted updates over the air"... so where in the world are you getting this from?
This is a right to repair issue, as the first part of your statement talks about. This is farmers in the feild, and gasketA broke, now either they have the right to modify their own software (that exist on their systems, not on a server somewhere, so not SaSS), or they have to pay a JD contractor to come out, and lose all that daylight in the meantime.
>Why is it that these farmers believe they have a right to modify that software?
Because, farmers of all people have traditionally been supporters of the free software movement before the free software movement even exist... in the form that farmers have exercised the second software freedom
"The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish. Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
and see no reason they should have to stop now just because some corporation wants more money. In the past instead of software it was justy a pair of pliers and a welder.
The real question is, seeing how to fundamentally misunderstand and misstate the issue, how is it that you think they shouldn't be able to modify their software?
Following this horrible line of thought, what abuse does it not allow? What's next; "You may not weld that axle because it contains our proprietary metal blend and we own the patent on the method for repairing it and we also own the patent on the filler-rod needed "? The mind boggles at the mental gymnastics.
Because software as a service is the wrong model for farmers.
When equipment breaks in the middle of the field during harvest you do what needs to be done to fix it right then and there.
Edit: grammar
I'd have less of a problem with this if it were a free and open source license, and therefore there's competition available for the service, including do it yourself service should you choose.
But most farms are now corporate so it sorta makes sense those types will drive this kind of closed loop proprietary fixed cost maintenance model.
That's a good point. If they're corporate and the tractor driver is paid by the hour then the pressure to fix isn't there. Though I suspect a corporate farm would contract out harvesting so they pay a fixed cost per unit-area, and now the contractor is under pressure to fix asap.
> When we buy a piece of software, we own and "physically" posses a binary which we feel we can rightly take apart, modify, and mess with it because we view it as analogous to owning a toaster or stereo in the physical world. It's in our home, we can touch it, and we in essence control it.
In what way does any of that not apply to owning a tractor?
> Now the same is never said for software as a service. We buy subscriptions to services all the time but don't demand an ability to modify or control the software.
Yes we do! People have been pissed about DRM, hardware locks, and access restrictions in commercial products for about as long as they've existed. It's a big issue and getting bigger every year. Locked smartphones, unremovable Windows telemetry, Garadget bricking some guy's gizmo over a bad review. You've been on Hacker News for over a year, how can you possibly think that?
> pursue a model by which their software is more or less SaSS
A tractor isn't a service. Fixing problems in goods after they were sold doesn't make the purchased product (the tractor) a service either.
In general, "SaSS" (and "SaaS") is a useless buzzword. If you provide an application on a webpage that people can subscribe to, you're offering "service". If you're selling a tractor with automatic software updates, you're selling a good that may include software internally and access to service that provides software updates.<side note>Adding "Software as ..." is useless. Like the people that rushed to prefix everything with "Internet ..." in the dot-com era indicates the speaker incorrectly believes that goods and services suddenly lose some of their usual properties and become something fundamentally new when "Software" (or "Internet") is added. No, it's still mostly the same good or service. Maybe adding the unnecessary term "Software" may contribute to this confusion that mistakes goods for services?
> Why is it that these farmers believe they have a right to modify that software?</side note>The same reason everyone else believes they have the right to modify the goods they purchase. This is a fundamental feature of what it means to own property. Yes, they do not have the right to copy the internal software, but that isn't what the farmers are trying to do. They just want to fix the tractor they purchased. If someone else retains the power to forbid you from modifying your own property, you don't actually own it.
Why does John Deere think it has the right to undermine the concept of property rights? Why do so many people accept that reinterpretation and defend tying[1] a service and/or software license to the purchase of a good, which is forbidden by the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts?
And to add to that: there are lots of examples of services that are only tacked on to a sold good in order to turn that sale into a permanent dependency of the buyer on the seller. And that's just plain abusive.
Except farmers or any customer who buys physical product are under no obligation to understand or believe there is Software that is running the Physical product they purchased. If i buy a physical product i should be able to control it completely, unless i am not buying a physical product but a service that happen to be physical, in which case seller must own all responsibility of its performance in the field.
When you buy software as a service you are effectively renting access to someone else's hardware wherein the software in question runs. We pay more than cost to make everything someone else's problem and we understand that the hardware belongs to someone else.
When you are talking about software running on the physical hardware that you have sold to people they have all trials and tribulations of ownership while you the creator are insisting on retaining control in order to suck more money out of their pockets.
To make the issue vastly more clear they having paid for ownership are insisting on free usage of the ALL the hardware involved including all processors and storage and insisting that the machine shouldn't deliberately disable itself unless it would be unsafe or damaging to run.
This isn't an unreasonable expectation.
Buy a piece of software? Since ancient times there's no such thing for mere mortals. Read the EULA. You do not own that software. You've bought a temporary, rather one-sided, and revocable license. You absolutely do not have any right to take it apart or modify it. That's the entire point of free and open source software (note not merely open source).