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Colorado governor signs tractor right-to-repair law opposed by John Deere
- neogodless 4y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35532479 Colorado passes agricultural Right to Repair (ifixit.com - 15 days ago, 124 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35714294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35714294 Colorado becomes first to pass ‘right to repair’ for farmers (wivb.com - 1 day ago, 83 comments)
- frankfrank13 4y agoHopefully we see more like this. But also, as a Coloradoan, just wanna say I appreciate Polis for giving time to real legislation. I know now everyone loves him, he is a politician after all, but you gotta love a Gov. who doesn't exist solely to posture for the extreme half of his/her base.
- dabluecaboose 4y agoI have to say my biggest criticism of Polis is his asinine opinions on Pueblo chile being superior to Hatch
- mfragin 4y agoHere in Pueblo there are a lot of "closet" Hatch chili people ;-) Seriously though, I think Polis has done a good job and he's the rare politician who can understand the implications of the right-to-repair law. When I was teaching Comp Sci at the high school level and we got a bunch of refurbished computers from his foundation ( http://www.jaredpolisfoundation.org/ http://www.jaredpolisfoundation.org/ ). The desktops came with bare-bone Windows and a bunch of open source applications. Of course we put Linux on all of them anyway, but most people back then would have NOT known how to use a Linux box, so the setup they came with was understandable.
- dfxm12 4y agoWe should be so lucky that our politicians' biggest fault is poor taste in chiles... :)
- mkhpalm 4y agoIts pretty "sus" if you ask me. What else are they doing? Putting mayonnaise in their sopaipillas? ;) híjole!
- deepsquirrelnet 4y agoWhen he was still a congressman, I met him when he showed up unannounced to meeting night at a hackerspace I was involved with. I thought it was cool that he was making an effort to get out to meet and hang out with people he represented. Real genuine guy. He takes his job seriously.
- tejohnso 4y agoWhy couldn't this have been done through market competition? Is there no tractor manufacturer who could step up and advertise their lower TCO with their open repair policy? And if not, and if the demand was so strong, why wouldn't a new company have sprung up to compete on that basis?
- scotty79 4y ago> Why couldn't this have been done through market competition? Is Contrary to popular belief markets don't solve everything. They are just price and exploit discovery mechanisms. Apparently taking away consumers ability to repair is something that can be exploited and giving them right to repair is something that almost cannot.
- jacksnipe 4y agoIt’s hard to imagine a more mature industry than farming capital. It’s not exactly going to be easy to even compete on quality, let alone disrupt.
- forgetfreeman 4y agoThis is how hard that industry is to disrupt: I needed a mid-sized utility tractor in the 40-60 hp range with a loader. I briefly visited the local Mahindra dealer, decided their offerings looked both expensive and flimsy, and then spent a month on FB marketplace until I found a 1974 Ford Industrial in good working order.
- naikrovek 4y agothere are reasons for government, and things like this are one of them. left alone, companies will always prioritize short-term goals over long-term goals. budgets in the short-term are negatively impacted by this decision for all/most tractor makers, which is why they resisted this change. no one can accurately predict market forces that far out, so short-term concerns, being much easier to predict, win out.
- valine 4y agoOne of the main benefits of right to repair is to keep tractors in service for longer. Your solution is for farmers to throw away their tractors and buy new ones? What’s to stop the new manufacturer from implementing a similar policy once the farmers are locked in with an expensive purchase?
- kodah 4y agoThis is a huge win for rural people, open source, and ag-tech. Hats off to Colorado for understanding what's at stake and the brass to fix it.
- whitemary 4y agoHardly. This never should have been necessary to begin with. It's pathetic that it took so long to reverse.
- bigwavedave 4y ago>> This is a huge win for rural people, open source, and ag-tech. Hats off to Colorado for understanding what's at stake and the brass to fix it. > Hardly. This never should have been necessary to begin with. It's pathetic that it took so long to reverse. Are you kidding me? We have been lambasting corrupt politicians who are too greedy to stand against lobbyists and wishing for the right to repair for years and now that it's happened, all you can say is "no big deal, this isn't a win, harrumph harrumph?" Bollocks to you, good sir. Of course it should have been a given in the first place! However, while I can't speak for you, I myself live in an imperfect world where we must do the best we can with what we have. So if, for a change, elected officials act in the best interests of their constituents to overturn something that you and I both readily agree is a disgusting perversion of the law, YES it's a win, and GOOD FOR THEM. Shame on you.
- kodah 4y agoI mean, I hear you, but freedoms have been incrementally been being taken away from lay people for at least the past two decades. We finally won one, I think if we're going to continue to fight the long fight then we need to drop our salty packs for a bit and celebrate.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoIt shouldn't be necessary to say freedom is a basic human right but in practice it is absolutely necessary given how often corporations will trample all over it. Congratulations to Colorado citizens for enshrining those rights into law. I hope this paves the way to enshrining general computing freedom into law as well.
- asebold 4y agoThis is so, so important for helping family farms stay alive. The amount my family has saved by being able to fix and even modify stuff on their own is huge. My dad still mows our lawn with an antique Allis-Chalmers hooked up to a commercial mower. Equipment is wildly expensive compared to margins at smaller scales (think like 2k acres for small farms). Things need to last for decades or generations in order to keep a profit.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago[flagged]
- ep103 4y agoIf the John Deere engineers understand those systems so well, then they could design their products in ways that the farmers could repair the products for common use cases. They are intentionally designing the products to prevent that. That's the whole problem.
- JoeAltmaier 4y ago[flagged]
- eganist 4y agoIt kinda just sounds like you're content with family farms not existing, because all of your points fail to address the economic realities for these farms.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoHa! Family farms. Here in Iowa they are a dying (dead) breed. Folks make that claim similar to 'For the Children!' It's a generation too late to save anything like a family farm. Maybe a family-held corporation? An agribusiness combine?
- 4y ago
- jnsie 4y agoWho wants to set up a company to repair John Deere equipment? We can aptly call it "Dear John".
- LastNevadan 4y agoDid you hear about the tractor salesman whose wife left him? She left him a John Deere letter!
- vvpan 4y agoAre there countries out there with good right-to-repair laws? How does Colorado now stand up on the international scale?
- eitland 4y agoI think EU is getting there. One recent win: Nintendo has agreed to lifetime replacement of Switch controllers, and while they or their reseller tried to weasel their way out of it by demanding sales receipts, consumer authorities has already pointed out the ridiculousness of it as every single one of them are eligible for replacement anyway.
- lithos 4y agoIndia has beaten down patents on seeds/genotypes. Lays tried to sue a few potatoe farmers, when they saw they were destined to lose the case they withdrew it, Gov't realizing they weren't going to get the case law to fix the issue decided to just outright invalidate a bunch of the patents.
- userbinator 4y agoChina. I'm only half-joking. Not really a law, but their attitude towards IP means that you can find schematics and parts (many of them aftermarket) for tons of equipment there.
- friend_and_foe 4y agoThis is only for farmers and farm equipment. I'll take a win when I get one, but do we have a right to repair our property or not? I think we do, and a government gracefully giving us some of our rights is not good enough.
- ddtaylor 4y agoWe just need to take this same success and copy/paste it to other industries enough times until everyone gets tired of doing N different legislation and a more abstract and widespread bill is created and passed. Farm equipment was a good first win because the opposition isn't as big as some other industries. It's relatively easy to get everyone on board with helping farmers and compared to say Apple or Google companies like John Deer don't have as deep of pockets. We probably won't have a lot of success jumping directly to one of the more difficult markets like phones or cars, since the opposition there is strong, well connected and well funded. The next battle will likely be won over a market that is bigger than farm equipment but smaller than phones or cars in general. I could see kitchen appliances, washesr/dryers or other equipment in that space being a good target. It would be relatively easy to motivate a base of people to care about it, because everyone has these appliances, and the opposition is fragmented and not as well funded in lobbying.
- pabs3 4y agoIn one of the earlier threads about this bill, someone said that doing the bill once per type of product is easier because you split your set of opponents up into smaller groups. So just going small bills forever might be better.
- ip26 4y agoStep by step. John Deere is allegedly one of the most flagrant abusers of repairability, so it’s the right place to start.
- MisterTea 4y agoThis sets precedence for future cases. This is a good win no matter how small or obscure people want to think it is.
- adamc 4y agoIt's a step. The right to repair should apply to many items beyond farm equipment, but hey, it's still a win.
- diamondfist25 4y agoI used to work at John Deere. The monopoly status and the amounts we can extract from parts and services is astronomical. Taught me lessons about never wanting any companies to control over me like that
- megablast 4y agoOne state down.
- trinsic2 4y ago> Manufacturers also can't impose "substantial" obligations, such as requiring an equipment owner or independent repair provider to "become an authorized repair provider of the manufacturer." Hmm. I'm thinking about apple right there, for a number of years now, Apple has been requiring independent repair centers like mine to adhere to restrictive contractual agreements. This needs to be applied to them as well. Apple has no business telling people how to repair their own devices or restricting how people lawfully obtain parts.
- Nifty3929 4y agoI wonder about the mechanics of how this would be enforced, and on what basis. What if John Deere just doesn't do that? Will they not be able to sell tractors in CO? Or what if they just decide not to anymore on their own? And then what if I buy a tractor from them out of state and bring it into CO. Does John Deere have to provide repair parts/manuals to me? What if they have slightly different models for CO and everywhere else? Does this also put upward pressure on tractor prices as any other manufacturer would also have to comply with this? (Meaning competition won't prevent passing the cost along to the farmer)
- scotty79 4y agoI think since they already sold tractors in CO they should be compelled to release manuals/parts and if they don't just be fined with escalating fines till they do or go out of business.