The fact that they purposely cripple your equipment with software is ludicrous. It's even more ridiculous to expect farmers to know IT when they used to be able to fix their equipment with hammers and wrenches. After well over a decade, it's good to see movement is finally being made to address this absolute b.s. It's not just John Deere doing this, a lot of the major companies are selling you stuff you don't truly own. Take your phone for example.

My thoughts exactly.

I can't believe how much progress the right to repair movement has made! It's one of the few areas of societal change that I'm actually happy to hear about these days.

I think the problem is the farmers would be happy to know IT if it meant they could fix their damn tractor.
Deere doesn't want them to know IT, it wants them to just call their local Deere service center anytime anything doesn't work.
Problem is, if it's during a harvest or some other critical time, they can't wait a week for a service appointment so they have to pay through the nose for immediate call out. And much of the time, the problem is something that they are easily capable to fix on their own, but can't because they don't have access to the service software that only dealers get. Or it's a situation like iPhones where they can easily make the repair but need the software to authorize the repair.

The result was a lot of farmers installing hacked Ukrainian firmware on their tractors, simply because the hacked version would accept any part connected and not require authorization from a service laptop.

Years ago, folks hacked a Jeep Wrangler remotely, with a WIRED reporter in the car: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/

That freaked the shit out of vehicle manufacturers. It led to encrypted CANBus messages: https://dev.to/living_syn/can-bus-message-security-3h43

Problem was, your mom and pop repair shop would need a special $$$ 'authorized' dongle from the manufacturer to be able to diagnose problems beyond what plain OBD-II let you see. This effectively locked out third-party repair shops. People screamed and IIRC, a lot of car manufacturers backed down and just hardened remote access.

What Deere did was even more harsh. They tried to block off not only self repair, but third-party firmware that made the tractors work better, especially older ones that were out of warranty: https://schiller-tuning.com/vehicle-listings/agriculture/john-deere

They're trying to game copyright laws and click-through terms-of-service agreements to lock out third party repair.

This is a test case. If they lose, it'll be a BIG win for Right to Repair laws, covering phones, laptops, consoles, etc.

Ok I'm a proponent of right to repair and despise manufacturing techniques that lock repair shops out, make spare parts from 3rd parties impossible to install, or create planned obsolescence, or any shenanigans like this. It's basically anti-everybody else and suggests weakness and fear instead of quality and strength.

But help me understand how it's possible that our "free market" is enabling this, unless it's just a controlled market charading as free?

Is John Deere giving the hardware away for free to those who sign long term subscriptions or something?

If John Deere is the Apple-esque ecosystem of tractors where is the "PC" diy manufacture and why doesn't the market support them.

John Deere is another one of those companies that started out with high quality products and then got overrun by managers who care about money and nothing else and will lie, steal, and cheat to get it

John Deere is another one of those companies that started out with high quality products and then got overrun by managers who care about money and nothing else and will lie, steal, and cheat to get it