Comment by stackskipton
6 hours ago
OEM can change their mind at any moment and there is always going to be an MBA rubbing their hands together thinking about all the money that can be made.
This needs to be solved at government level with right to repair laws and requirement for open standards instead of believing in magic of "free market".
Now is especially a good time for Canada to do it. Cory Doctorow had a fantastic CBC interview about this. Scrapping anti-tampering protections would harm anti-Canadian tech companies while also building rapport with American farmers who would be able to use Canadian software on their tractors.
Something tells me that the best tractor software would be free, not nationalized.
Yes, free, and created in Canada by developers not burdened by American red tape.
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Ever-more-restrictive government regulations are what allows these OEMs to ‘leverage’ their market power this way. I am not sure that a new regulation can solve it, as these sorts of mandates don’t seem to have worked in any other market.
The argument isn't 'more' regulations or 'less' regulations, it is the right regulations. The problem is that big companies slowly allow regulations that don't hurt them but do block competition by aggressively fighting regulations that help the startup (their competition) or help the consumer in ways that make them less money. It isn't hard to be evil and create regulatory capture. You don't actually have to be active in crafting regulation, just be active in blocking the right regulation. General statements that are 'against regulation' play into big companies making things worse.
These big companies absolutely allow regulations that "hurt" them. Deere doesn't want to deal with farmers who are pissed off that emissions stuff results in a service call at a bad time and can't be overridden, or obnoxious safety stuff that make products less useful outside of their "textbook" application, or something that forces them to expensively certify their product is XYZ or something.
Buuuuut, the cost of implementing that stuff hurts the competition way more, so Deere and friends don't really fight it.
They're trading absolute market size for stronger control over market share. Less people are going to buy their products at the margin if the products are made worse. But those that do will buy it from them, so more profit.
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You're right, the solution is getting rid of swathes of intellectual property legislation, not adding more.
That's a double edged sword. Investors demand a return regardless of what IP law is. They'll invest in the companies that find some way to protect their investment -- NDAs, stronger technical protections, services-models, etc.
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Remember that those regulations are written by the OEMs they benefit and whom bribe legislators to pass those regulations.
Any argument made without acknowledging this is purely in bad faith. The problem is not regulation that benefits OEMs. The problem is that you can simply purchase regulations that benefit you.
There are many regulations, written by a variety of actors, often in strange alliances. Safety, environmental, and disclosure regulations are often the culprits behind industry consolidation and oligopolization.
> instead of believing in magic of "free market"
It looks like magic because it works like magic. Surprisingly it is also possible to believe in the magic of "government intervention" though it looks less like magic and more like unintended consequences.
Doing nothing and letting the market do whatever is also full of unintended consequences. Your argument is like letting your yard go to weed and accumulate a bunch of knotweed and himalayan blackberry. Yeah you can argue that you didn’t do anything to create that situation but at the end of the day you’re still responsible for it.
There's no magic necessary. TFA highlights the exact mechanism by which markets can fill a gap or need via entrepreneurship when incumbents fail to deliver what customers want. It's not guaranteed to happen or work in every case, but there's money to be made by giving people what they actually want.
A lot of electronics is useful, it can reduce fuel use or help with more accurate driving.
Farmers are just pissed they lose the ability to repair the vehicle easily or get stuck with monthly subscription because tractor company has changed the terms and you are praying they don't change it further.
A modern John Deere tractor with a robust right-to-repair would still be a pain to do maintenance on. A big part of the reason people want old tractors is because they don't have these additional computer controlled systems which break and require time and effort to fix.
It's almost as if freedom only exists for those with the money to hire lawyers to make it happen. Farmers are basically screwed in that their location at the bottom foundation level of society really ties their hands in what they can get away with before things start getting tumultuous. Yet get a few factories under your belt and enshittify, and suddenly it's all "your way or the highway". Odd that.
It would be nice if this could happen more smoothly and rapidly, without some random people having to become experts in tractors from the ground up, and that's what regulations could help with. Say, if it was legal to copy from the best.
But the company in the article isn't filling the gap. Farm owners want the technology. They don't want to be held hostage over the technology when it needs maintenance, repair, or adaptation after the initial sale.
Honestly do you even need to build a lowtech alternative? Just anounce you will and retire on cartel kickbacks to slow it down?
Government regulations weren't necessary for Framework to make the most open laptop product line in history which includes a the 'Pro' 13" laptop chassis which is both backwards and forwards compatible with components that were sold 5 years ago on day 1.