11 ms·

Software fees to make up 10% of John Deere's revenues by 2030

147 points by agomez314 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
xhkkffbf 4y ago
Software is just taking over the world. I realize that this may make it harder for a farmer with a wrench to fix the machinery as farmers have done for so many years, but it's just reality. If there were a market for stripped-down, software-free, easy-to-fix farm machinery, I would guess someone would fulfill that demand.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  This just follows the same trend of patenting crops and animal's DNA. These are all effects of overreaching IP laws creating inescapably profitable business models out of thin air rather than necessity. Software is only eating the world because we let it. When they're done eating what makes our lunch and lunch box money, then the robot tractors will turn to eat us.
  - xyzzyz 4y ago
    Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them? Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development?
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      > Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? What makes you think the breeds they're developing are "better"? Monsanto famously developed "terminator seeds" that were only stopped from distribution under intense pressure from the community since they posed a major risk to the food supply[0]. The seeds were genetically designed to die after one harvest and Monsanto couldn't guarantee that the terminator variants wouldn't cross-pollinate with legacy varieties and inherit the same trait. That is pure greed. Not improvement, not innovation. Pure, unadulterated greed. We have to move past the argument that all businesses are truly innovating all the time. The only thing constantly being innovated is their ability to make money. Take everything else with a grain of salt. 0: https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/ https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        If they aren't better, why would a farmer care if they're for sale? They could just use the older varieties and not suffer any penalty. No, the whining about patented plants is because they would be superior, and farmers who spurned them would be at a competitive disadvantage. You can't have it both ways. Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted?
        thr0wawayf00 4y ago
        > If they aren't better, why would a farmer care if they're for sale? They could just use the older varieties and not suffer any penalty. Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. Monsanto has license agreements in place that permit them to sue farmers that use their seeds without permission. This means that if your neighboring farmer uses Monsanto seeds and some of the seeds blow onto your land and cross-pollinate, you're now violating Monsanto's patents. They've sued farmers for millions over this[0]. > Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted? Like I said, Monsanto couldn't prove that terminator seeds wouldn't cross-pollinate with other varieties, which could've triggered a mass-starvation event unlike anything we've ever seen. It's crazy to see people defending this kind of behavior. 0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
        pfdietz 4y ago
        > Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. If you buy seed from another supplier, Monsanto would sue you? It's incredible you could make this statement without realizing how completely and obviously absurd it is. If this scenario were real, other seed producers could have demolished Monsanto with restraint of trade lawsuits, and would have. And no, Monsanto never sued a single farmer due to inadvertent contamination from GMO pollen. They stated they never would, and it's very likely that even if they had tried, it would not have worked (since the farmer is not responsible for the contamination.) They DID sue a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field that had been contaminated, to kill off the crops without the trait, and repeated this until he had selected for and concentrated the resistance trait. THAT act, spraying and collecting, showed malicious intent and violated the patent. It's not something an honest farmer would have to worry about. If terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) caused traces of cross pollination, why would that be a problem? The trait would rapidly select itself out of a population.
    - wbsss4412 4y ago
      You set this up as an either/or as though we had no system of crop development in place before patents. Though this may accelerate development, the real question is whether the cost is worth it.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development? I don't get it. Humans have selectively bred better plants for millenia before the era of modern IP. A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? This is ideology, not economics. There are plenty of institutions that would work on improving crops even if Monsanto & co. got out of the game. Universities come to mind here. And the results of their work could actually help farmers that can't afford IP-encumbered crops, not just large, wealthy farmers.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        > A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? If you are fine with the process being much slower than now, why do you care about 20 years of patent protection? If you’re willing to wait centuries for improvements the modern corporations achieve in years, why not just consider the patent protection period to be extra part of the process? It’s still faster than the millennia you talk about, no?
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      > Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them? If that's actually the alternative (and I don't think it is), then yes. Patenting DNA should not be allowed.
      - xyzzyz 4y ago
        But why? You’re proposing something with clear negative consequences. Do you have some reason? Are there some benefits of blocking parenting organisms?
  - WHATDOESIT 4y ago
    So what's stopping people from making an open-source open-hardware tractor? There's stuff like Open Source Ecology which is very cool but nowhere near what John Deere offers. It's just hard to make stuff on their level and engineers want to be paid big bucks and not work too much. How do you ensure you have enough for their wages with your open-source open-hardware tractor company?
    - speed_spread 4y ago
      I believe that the culture is just not there, generally. The industry is thinking in short-term ROI and "cost of doing business" ways but are actually locking themselves in which will have immense long-term social (externalized) costs. We hear a lot about GMO's health and environmental concerns but the real issue IMO is the captive business model these proprietary technologies imply. This will take decades to change. In the current conditions, I agree that an open-source supplier is a though proposition. "The invisible hand" is working on a time scale too short to allow self-regulation, thus the playing field would have to be leveled politically, maybe by changing the IP laws to benefit the people more. Unfortunately, a nation of vehement lawyers is very unlikely to allow this.
    - Aperocky 4y ago
      Just give it time, people used to pay for OS back in the days.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      The people who want an open-source open-hardware tractor continue to run their older tractors forever; you can get parts for nearly anything and the oldest tractors can be fixed with a welding torch and a supply of steel. The cross-section of "willing to pay full price for a brand new farm implement" and "cares enough to get a slower/less featureful device for open-source" is very small. If the open tractor was better and cheaper than the Deere, it'd win even without being open, and if it is not then it has a hard row to hoe. Construction equipment went down this path long ago, I've heard that Cat will basically give you machines for free as long as you sign up for the service/maintenance contract ...
  - xhkkffbf 4y ago
    I kind of like all of the computers in my car. The computer control of fuel injection, for instance, has boosted mileage and dramatically reduced pollution. There are dozens of smart chips that are saving lives and cleaning the environment. So, you can demonize it by invoking the patent office or software IP, but if that's part of the trade off, well, I'm generally willing to make it.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      What happens when the automaker updates the software in your car to charge you a monthly fee in order to use those same computerized components? This is already happening, most recently with Toyota putting its remote start feature behind a monthly subscription paywall[0]. Imagine buying a car that had all the features you want, only to get an email 6 months later that you now need to pay a subscription to continue using those very same features. 0: https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-remote-start-into-a-subscription-service https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
      - slt2021 4y ago
        it doesnt work exactly like that. when you buy a car, you can either pay full price for a feature, lets say heated seats for $4000, or you can purchase subscription for $80/mo, or you may opt out of that feature, save money and it will be disabled programmatically in your car. Just as if car was never supplied with heating element for seats. yet your car will still be shipped with heated seats - just because it is cheaper to do that for manufacturing purposes. Cheaper to equip all cars with the standard heated seats, than manufacture two model of seats: with and without heating. plus you can always subscribe for that feature any day post purchase, so there is no downside for manufacturer. you get what you pay for. you can always pay upfront for the feature and will never have to pay subscription
  - kickout 4y ago
    Mmm, I think your wording is clunky. Most of the crops that have patents have the patent on biotech trait. You can take a patent on a newly developed crop variety, just like any other _novel_ invention--plants are no different. Also look up the Plant Variety Protection act (1974?), which also provides IP protection for crops. Without these, it's debatable how much innovation would occur in crops/plants.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      Plants are different. Unlike most inventions plants will generally replicate themselves given the opportunity. The idea that you can sue for patent infringement when this happens naturally is absurd on its face, yet here we are: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
      - kickout 4y ago
        Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention. Also your comment does not make sense. Some plants are can self-pollinate and are sufficiently inbred so that they 'replicate' themselves. Many plants are out-crossers. There also exists apomixis, asexual reproduction etc. Plant are also well suited to clonal propagation. 'Natural' is a completely vague term. Many of of the crops we have bred and that are IP protected (soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, rice) have effectively 0% chance of occurring 'naturally' in nature because they conditions for their fitness to be high enough likely would never exist.
        AlexandrB 4y ago
        > Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention. I never argued that they were patenting wild plants. But bred plants existed long before they could be patented. Indeed, Monsanto did not start with "wild" strains, but with strains developed over millenia of selective breeding. Plant patents are a form of "enclosure", where a domain that was previously freely available to the public (plant breeding) becomes commercialized and monetized so only a few entities can realistically improve on plant strains without risking a lawsuit. How this benefits innovation in the broad sense is beyond me. But it's certainly good for biotech companies' bottom line.
- mamonster 4y ago
  Well the argument here is that a company would also need to be competitive in the actual machinery. John Deere has a huge moat in this space, a company stripped down, software-free and easy to fix machinery would need to make sure that it competes on everything else and has that as a differentiating factor. John Deere probably realized that that's an unlikely proposition and utilizing its market advantage to the maximum. But I mean the more "abusive" the business model the higher the incentive to innovate, so maybe in the future we could see such machinery.
- mminer237 4y ago
  There already are competitors with less aggressive software, but building massive machines like Deere does requires a lot of capital. Kubota's largest tractor is like 200 HP. My understanding is that the Clean Air Act now largely requires manufacturers to ensure consumers can't modify the software to run if it fails emissions checks, but I haven't researched the law myself.
  - csours 4y ago
    Even uncertainty about enforcement can motivate companies to lock things down.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Software may be taking over the world, but the "pay us rent forever to use the same software" business model doesn't have to. Right-to-repair should extend to software (for example, providing API documentation to customers), especially after EOL.
smm11 4y ago
Don't remove the mattress tag.
- sockaddr 4y ago
  What? Do you not understand why that tag is there?
  - smm11 4y ago
    Apparently warning against this is a big no-no!
peteradio 4y ago
Does a high-margin spur on a third party service? I've thought about what that would take, I imagine you'd have to weather some pretty serious lawsuits but maybe if you had some backing it would be doable?
- thr0wawayf00 4y ago
  You'd need enough backing to fend off a company that earned almost $40B in revenue in 2020 from an attempt to capture one of its fastest-growing revenue streams. Good luck finding a serious investor that would be willing to try it.
  - peteradio 4y ago
    What kind of legal fight would you be up against? If John Deere wanted to put up lets say 100 million to fight, what kind of money would need to be put up to defend, if its lets say 10 million or less, then maybe that's worth it if the market is 4000 million.
    - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
      The point of Deere defending their market would be to make it as expensive as possible for outsiders to take. There's no way they would let a billion-dollar revenue stream go for a few million. Just look at how much money was spent in the Google v Oracle lawsuit over Java APIs. Plus, if Deere won, they'd come at you for damages, which would get expensive very quickly.
    - everforward 4y ago
      The problem is probably in risk vs reward. You have to succeed in at least one lawsuit against John Deere (other countries may have different laws, and thus more lawsuits), and then you have to convince people to buy your third party stuff rather than OEM stuff. Then on top of that, you have to pray that John Deere doesn't successfully lobby for a law banning your software, or find a way to prevent your software working (i.e. a continual arms race). The profit is probably there, but I think the cost to get to the profit and the likelihood of failing are both too high to be appealing to investors. Those same investors could just invest in John Deere itself and probably get a better risk-weighted return.
throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
Much of this is apparently are coming from EOL devices while also violating GPL. Shameful. Can't someone take action on this? The article references Sick Codes' talk at DEFCON, which was wonderfully done and highlights many serious issues here.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Oooo are they? Report them to the software freedom conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html
  - disintegore 4y ago
    I'd be surprised if they didn't already know
elzbardico 4y ago
I wonder, aren't there other vendors with more basic equipment? maybe chinese?
- Wingman4l7 4y ago
  Western countries don't trust China's computing hardware, for obvious reasons... why on Earth would they trust equipment that supports agricultural infrastructure?
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    It's a tractor, those things used to not have any computing hardware. What we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there No farmer wants this. Good servicing beats open source in hardware, in farming and frankly most non-enthusiast spaces.
      - mistrial9 4y ago
        any large market has segments - it is naive or worse to paint "every farmer" with a single brush; unconstructive
      - the_third_wave 4y ago
        > No farmer wants this I want this, my neighbour wants this, his neighbour - who runs an older, pre-proprietary John Deere wants this. Farmers need their tractors to work and anything that helps there is a boon. While ag contractors may run the latest most modern equipment farmers tend to have a few tractors themselves which tend to be a bit older, a bit more run-down than those shiny new JD/MF/NH/Valtra (in Sweden and Finland)/etc. machines. They can still do with some of the nicer parts of the electromagic on those machines. So... once those JDs go out of support, who knows? There may be a market for an aftermarket control box, one which pulls the machine out of the clutches of the mothership and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of the farmer. I have a proposal, just donate one of those machines to me and I'll rig up such a box. Not that my current 1982 UTB640DTC (a Romanian license-built/copied (it is a bit unclear) Fiat 640 with FWA and a front loader) has given up but still... So, good servicing is fine if you can afford it but many farmers tend to their own equipment as well in which case the availability of parts and protocol specifications really comes in handy. Mechanical parts - that what used to define a tractor - tend to be readily available but electronics and specifications are a different story.
otikik 4y ago
If their sales go down enough, I bet they can make that percentage even larger.
tengbretson 4y ago
I don't really understand why the tech-focused crowd has taken this up as some kind of proxy fight when by-and-large we gave up having root access to the machines we do our day-to-day work on decades ago.
- celestialcheese 4y ago
  Because politicians care about farmers. It's a perfect proxy to fight for software freedom and Right-to-repair, because it mobilizes legislators from nebraska and other non-technical folks to speak up about issues that us programmers and techies have been harping about for decades.
  - tengbretson 4y ago
    Programmers have been enriching themselves for years by creating the tools and infrastructure upon which the massive shift from CAPEX to subscription-based economics has been built and now they want to speak up? I don't want to hear it.
    - celestialcheese 4y ago
      Programmers did this? From my experience, programmers hate this industry shift to "rented" software, and it's the MBAs that have pushed this on us as they've infiltrated the C-suite over the last decade+.
    - snovv_crash 4y ago
      Programmers are also the only group who has been creating an ecosystem of completely free tools that anyone can use or modify for themselves with zero restrictions. Software has zero production costs and this enables all sorts of uses, moral and not.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      Cue a thread about how VSCode is a Trojan horse but nobody wants to stop using it because it's just so damn convenient. Edit: Or a thread about how users in western countries should not be allowed to run TikTok on their own devices because: China.
awinter-py 4y ago
if their software is actually not a giant pile of crap they should be happy to compete on the market by letting other companies sell software for their shitty phone (or tractor in this case) 'tying' has been illegal like forever, shocking to me we allow it for hardware + software bundles
shrubble 4y ago
A friend of mine is an organic pea and wheat farmer, about 700 acres this year. He is very anti-debt and specifically buys older tractors and equipment in order to have redundancy at low cost. Other people he knows load up on debt by buying new equipment - but 2 bad farming years in a row can put someone out of business and lose the farm.

147 points by agomez314 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Software is just taking over the world. I realize that this may make it harder for a farmer with a wrench to fix the machinery as farmers have done for so many years, but it's just reality. If there were a market for stripped-down, software-free, easy-to-fix farm machinery, I would guess someone would fulfill that demand.

speed_spread 4y ago
This just follows the same trend of patenting crops and animal's DNA. These are all effects of overreaching IP laws creating inescapably profitable business models out of thin air rather than necessity. Software is only eating the world because we let it. When they're done eating what makes our lunch and lunch box money, then the robot tractors will turn to eat us.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them? Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development?
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    > Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? What makes you think the breeds they're developing are "better"? Monsanto famously developed "terminator seeds" that were only stopped from distribution under intense pressure from the community since they posed a major risk to the food supply[0]. The seeds were genetically designed to die after one harvest and Monsanto couldn't guarantee that the terminator variants wouldn't cross-pollinate with legacy varieties and inherit the same trait. That is pure greed. Not improvement, not innovation. Pure, unadulterated greed. We have to move past the argument that all businesses are truly innovating all the time. The only thing constantly being innovated is their ability to make money. Take everything else with a grain of salt. 0: https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/ https://cases.open.ubc.ca/monsanto-and-terminator-seeds/
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      If they aren't better, why would a farmer care if they're for sale? They could just use the older varieties and not suffer any penalty. No, the whining about patented plants is because they would be superior, and farmers who spurned them would be at a competitive disadvantage. You can't have it both ways. Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted?
      - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
        > If they aren't better, why would a farmer care if they're for sale? They could just use the older varieties and not suffer any penalty. Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. Monsanto has license agreements in place that permit them to sue farmers that use their seeds without permission. This means that if your neighboring farmer uses Monsanto seeds and some of the seeds blow onto your land and cross-pollinate, you're now violating Monsanto's patents. They've sued farmers for millions over this[0]. > Oh, and why are terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) any worse than hybrid seeds, which don't breed true and effectively can't be replanted? Like I said, Monsanto couldn't prove that terminator seeds wouldn't cross-pollinate with other varieties, which could've triggered a mass-starvation event unlike anything we've ever seen. It's crazy to see people defending this kind of behavior. 0: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
        pfdietz 4y ago
        > Many farmers use Monsanto out of fear for being sued. If you buy seed from another supplier, Monsanto would sue you? It's incredible you could make this statement without realizing how completely and obviously absurd it is. If this scenario were real, other seed producers could have demolished Monsanto with restraint of trade lawsuits, and would have. And no, Monsanto never sued a single farmer due to inadvertent contamination from GMO pollen. They stated they never would, and it's very likely that even if they had tried, it would not have worked (since the farmer is not responsible for the contamination.) They DID sue a farmer who deliberately sprayed a field that had been contaminated, to kill off the crops without the trait, and repeated this until he had selected for and concentrated the resistance trait. THAT act, spraying and collecting, showed malicious intent and violated the patent. It's not something an honest farmer would have to worry about. If terminator seeds (which Monsanto never sold) caused traces of cross pollination, why would that be a problem? The trait would rapidly select itself out of a population.
  - wbsss4412 4y ago
    You set this up as an either/or as though we had no system of crop development in place before patents. Though this may accelerate development, the real question is whether the cost is worth it.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > Or do you have some alternative in mind to incentivize the development of better breeds and variants other than patenting? How else are the companies supposed to capture the fruits of their development? I don't get it. Humans have selectively bred better plants for millenia before the era of modern IP. A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? This is ideology, not economics. There are plenty of institutions that would work on improving crops even if Monsanto & co. got out of the game. Universities come to mind here. And the results of their work could actually help farmers that can't afford IP-encumbered crops, not just large, wealthy farmers.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      > A process that's far more time consuming than CRISPR. Yet now, there's suddenly no incentive to improve plants unless a corporation can own the results outright for 20 years? If you are fine with the process being much slower than now, why do you care about 20 years of patent protection? If you’re willing to wait centuries for improvements the modern corporations achieve in years, why not just consider the patent protection period to be extra part of the process? It’s still faster than the millennia you talk about, no?
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > Do you prefer that the companies patenting the DNA never developed the organisms in the first place, and that the farmers are left without the option of using them? If that's actually the alternative (and I don't think it is), then yes. Patenting DNA should not be allowed.
    - xyzzyz 4y ago
      But why? You’re proposing something with clear negative consequences. Do you have some reason? Are there some benefits of blocking parenting organisms?
- WHATDOESIT 4y ago
  So what's stopping people from making an open-source open-hardware tractor? There's stuff like Open Source Ecology which is very cool but nowhere near what John Deere offers. It's just hard to make stuff on their level and engineers want to be paid big bucks and not work too much. How do you ensure you have enough for their wages with your open-source open-hardware tractor company?
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    I believe that the culture is just not there, generally. The industry is thinking in short-term ROI and "cost of doing business" ways but are actually locking themselves in which will have immense long-term social (externalized) costs. We hear a lot about GMO's health and environmental concerns but the real issue IMO is the captive business model these proprietary technologies imply. This will take decades to change. In the current conditions, I agree that an open-source supplier is a though proposition. "The invisible hand" is working on a time scale too short to allow self-regulation, thus the playing field would have to be leveled politically, maybe by changing the IP laws to benefit the people more. Unfortunately, a nation of vehement lawyers is very unlikely to allow this.
  - Aperocky 4y ago
    Just give it time, people used to pay for OS back in the days.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The people who want an open-source open-hardware tractor continue to run their older tractors forever; you can get parts for nearly anything and the oldest tractors can be fixed with a welding torch and a supply of steel. The cross-section of "willing to pay full price for a brand new farm implement" and "cares enough to get a slower/less featureful device for open-source" is very small. If the open tractor was better and cheaper than the Deere, it'd win even without being open, and if it is not then it has a hard row to hoe. Construction equipment went down this path long ago, I've heard that Cat will basically give you machines for free as long as you sign up for the service/maintenance contract ...
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  I kind of like all of the computers in my car. The computer control of fuel injection, for instance, has boosted mileage and dramatically reduced pollution. There are dozens of smart chips that are saving lives and cleaning the environment. So, you can demonize it by invoking the patent office or software IP, but if that's part of the trade off, well, I'm generally willing to make it.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    What happens when the automaker updates the software in your car to charge you a monthly fee in order to use those same computerized components? This is already happening, most recently with Toyota putting its remote start feature behind a monthly subscription paywall[0]. Imagine buying a car that had all the features you want, only to get an email 6 months later that you now need to pay a subscription to continue using those very same features. 0: https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-remote-start-into-a-subscription-service https://www.thedrive.com/news/43329/toyota-made-its-key-fob-...
    - slt2021 4y ago
      it doesnt work exactly like that. when you buy a car, you can either pay full price for a feature, lets say heated seats for $4000, or you can purchase subscription for $80/mo, or you may opt out of that feature, save money and it will be disabled programmatically in your car. Just as if car was never supplied with heating element for seats. yet your car will still be shipped with heated seats - just because it is cheaper to do that for manufacturing purposes. Cheaper to equip all cars with the standard heated seats, than manufacture two model of seats: with and without heating. plus you can always subscribe for that feature any day post purchase, so there is no downside for manufacturer. you get what you pay for. you can always pay upfront for the feature and will never have to pay subscription
- kickout 4y ago
  Mmm, I think your wording is clunky. Most of the crops that have patents have the patent on biotech trait. You can take a patent on a newly developed crop variety, just like any other _novel_ invention--plants are no different. Also look up the Plant Variety Protection act (1974?), which also provides IP protection for crops. Without these, it's debatable how much innovation would occur in crops/plants.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Plants are different. Unlike most inventions plants will generally replicate themselves given the opportunity. The idea that you can sue for patent infringement when this happens naturally is absurd on its face, yet here we are: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto-sues-farmers-seed-patents https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/feb/12/monsanto...
    - kickout 4y ago
      Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention. Also your comment does not make sense. Some plants are can self-pollinate and are sufficiently inbred so that they 'replicate' themselves. Many plants are out-crossers. There also exists apomixis, asexual reproduction etc. Plant are also well suited to clonal propagation. 'Natural' is a completely vague term. Many of of the crops we have bred and that are IP protected (soybeans, corn, wheat, cotton, rice) have effectively 0% chance of occurring 'naturally' in nature because they conditions for their fitness to be high enough likely would never exist.
      - AlexandrB 4y ago
        > Nobody is patenting naturally occurring plants to my knowledge. Plant breeders make specific (usually) sexual crosses and sift through the progeny. Since plants have tremendous variation, many of the progeny are different than the parents. This is the basic form of one invention. I never argued that they were patenting wild plants. But bred plants existed long before they could be patented. Indeed, Monsanto did not start with "wild" strains, but with strains developed over millenia of selective breeding. Plant patents are a form of "enclosure", where a domain that was previously freely available to the public (plant breeding) becomes commercialized and monetized so only a few entities can realistically improve on plant strains without risking a lawsuit. How this benefits innovation in the broad sense is beyond me. But it's certainly good for biotech companies' bottom line.
mamonster 4y ago
Well the argument here is that a company would also need to be competitive in the actual machinery. John Deere has a huge moat in this space, a company stripped down, software-free and easy to fix machinery would need to make sure that it competes on everything else and has that as a differentiating factor. John Deere probably realized that that's an unlikely proposition and utilizing its market advantage to the maximum. But I mean the more "abusive" the business model the higher the incentive to innovate, so maybe in the future we could see such machinery.
mminer237 4y ago
There already are competitors with less aggressive software, but building massive machines like Deere does requires a lot of capital. Kubota's largest tractor is like 200 HP. My understanding is that the Clean Air Act now largely requires manufacturers to ensure consumers can't modify the software to run if it fails emissions checks, but I haven't researched the law myself.
- csours 4y ago
  Even uncertainty about enforcement can motivate companies to lock things down.
AlexandrB 4y ago
Software may be taking over the world, but the "pay us rent forever to use the same software" business model doesn't have to. Right-to-repair should extend to software (for example, providing API documentation to customers), especially after EOL.

smm11 4y ago

Don't remove the mattress tag.

sockaddr 4y ago
What? Do you not understand why that tag is there?
- smm11 4y ago
  Apparently warning against this is a big no-no!

peteradio 4y ago

Does a high-margin spur on a third party service? I've thought about what that would take, I imagine you'd have to weather some pretty serious lawsuits but maybe if you had some backing it would be doable?

thr0wawayf00 4y ago
You'd need enough backing to fend off a company that earned almost $40B in revenue in 2020 from an attempt to capture one of its fastest-growing revenue streams. Good luck finding a serious investor that would be willing to try it.
- peteradio 4y ago
  What kind of legal fight would you be up against? If John Deere wanted to put up lets say 100 million to fight, what kind of money would need to be put up to defend, if its lets say 10 million or less, then maybe that's worth it if the market is 4000 million.
  - thr0wawayf00 4y ago
    The point of Deere defending their market would be to make it as expensive as possible for outsiders to take. There's no way they would let a billion-dollar revenue stream go for a few million. Just look at how much money was spent in the Google v Oracle lawsuit over Java APIs. Plus, if Deere won, they'd come at you for damages, which would get expensive very quickly.
  - everforward 4y ago
    The problem is probably in risk vs reward. You have to succeed in at least one lawsuit against John Deere (other countries may have different laws, and thus more lawsuits), and then you have to convince people to buy your third party stuff rather than OEM stuff. Then on top of that, you have to pray that John Deere doesn't successfully lobby for a law banning your software, or find a way to prevent your software working (i.e. a continual arms race). The profit is probably there, but I think the cost to get to the profit and the likelihood of failing are both too high to be appealing to investors. Those same investors could just invest in John Deere itself and probably get a better risk-weighted return.

throwawayKiwi9 4y ago

Much of this is apparently are coming from EOL devices while also violating GPL. Shameful. Can't someone take action on this? The article references Sick Codes' talk at DEFCON, which was wonderfully done and highlights many serious issues here.

buildbot 4y ago
Oooo are they? Report them to the software freedom conservancy: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/help.html
- disintegore 4y ago
  I'd be surprised if they didn't already know

elzbardico 4y ago

I wonder, aren't there other vendors with more basic equipment? maybe chinese?

Wingman4l7 4y ago
Western countries don't trust China's computing hardware, for obvious reasons... why on Earth would they trust equipment that supports agricultural infrastructure?
- Aperocky 4y ago
  It's a tractor, those things used to not have any computing hardware. What we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > we really need is a open sourced tractor protocol so if it breaks you can just slap a new chip there No farmer wants this. Good servicing beats open source in hardware, in farming and frankly most non-enthusiast spaces.
    - mistrial9 4y ago
      any large market has segments - it is naive or worse to paint "every farmer" with a single brush; unconstructive
    - the_third_wave 4y ago
      > No farmer wants this I want this, my neighbour wants this, his neighbour - who runs an older, pre-proprietary John Deere wants this. Farmers need their tractors to work and anything that helps there is a boon. While ag contractors may run the latest most modern equipment farmers tend to have a few tractors themselves which tend to be a bit older, a bit more run-down than those shiny new JD/MF/NH/Valtra (in Sweden and Finland)/etc. machines. They can still do with some of the nicer parts of the electromagic on those machines. So... once those JDs go out of support, who knows? There may be a market for an aftermarket control box, one which pulls the machine out of the clutches of the mothership and puts it where it belongs, in the hands of the farmer. I have a proposal, just donate one of those machines to me and I'll rig up such a box. Not that my current 1982 UTB640DTC (a Romanian license-built/copied (it is a bit unclear) Fiat 640 with FWA and a front loader) has given up but still... So, good servicing is fine if you can afford it but many farmers tend to their own equipment as well in which case the availability of parts and protocol specifications really comes in handy. Mechanical parts - that what used to define a tractor - tend to be readily available but electronics and specifications are a different story.

otikik 4y ago

If their sales go down enough, I bet they can make that percentage even larger.

tengbretson 4y ago

I don't really understand why the tech-focused crowd has taken this up as some kind of proxy fight when by-and-large we gave up having root access to the machines we do our day-to-day work on decades ago.

celestialcheese 4y ago
Because politicians care about farmers. It's a perfect proxy to fight for software freedom and Right-to-repair, because it mobilizes legislators from nebraska and other non-technical folks to speak up about issues that us programmers and techies have been harping about for decades.
- tengbretson 4y ago
  Programmers have been enriching themselves for years by creating the tools and infrastructure upon which the massive shift from CAPEX to subscription-based economics has been built and now they want to speak up? I don't want to hear it.
  - celestialcheese 4y ago
    Programmers did this? From my experience, programmers hate this industry shift to "rented" software, and it's the MBAs that have pushed this on us as they've infiltrated the C-suite over the last decade+.
  - snovv_crash 4y ago
    Programmers are also the only group who has been creating an ecosystem of completely free tools that anyone can use or modify for themselves with zero restrictions. Software has zero production costs and this enables all sorts of uses, moral and not.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Cue a thread about how VSCode is a Trojan horse but nobody wants to stop using it because it's just so damn convenient. Edit: Or a thread about how users in western countries should not be allowed to run TikTok on their own devices because: China.

awinter-py 4y ago

if their software is actually not a giant pile of crap they should be happy to compete on the market by letting other companies sell software for their shitty phone (or tractor in this case) 'tying' has been illegal like forever, shocking to me we allow it for hardware + software bundles

shrubble 4y ago

A friend of mine is an organic pea and wheat farmer, about 700 acres this year. He is very anti-debt and specifically buys older tractors and equipment in order to have redundancy at low cost. Other people he knows load up on debt by buying new equipment - but 2 bad farming years in a row can put someone out of business and lose the farm.