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Nebraska is one of eight states in the US – including Minnesota, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wyoming, Tennessee and Kansas – seeking to pass "right to repair" legislation. All eyes will be on the Cornhusker state when the bill has its public hearing on 9 March, because its unique "unicameral legislature" (it's the only state to have a single parliamentary chamber) means laws can be enacted swiftly. If this bill, officially named LB67, gets through, it may lead to a domino effect through the rest of the US, as happened with a similar battle over the right to repair cars. These Nebraska farmers are fighting for all of us.
Big agriculture and big tech – including John Deere, Apple and AT&T – are lobbying hard against the bill, and have sent representatives to the Capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska, to spend hours talking to senators, citing safety, security and intellectual property concerns.
John Deere has gone as far as to claim that farmers don't own the tractors they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for, but instead receive a "license to operate the vehicle". They lock users into license agreements that forbid them from even looking at the software running the tractor or the signals it generates.
Another article on the topic at Techdirt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 08 2017, @10:37PM
Structure and order is not what's in dispute.
What's in dispute is action without such structure and order—specifically, action without any clear foundation in prior agreement to some set of rules of interaction (e.g., a contract, or a long-lived understanding, etc.).
In this case, it seems like a bunch of farmers have agreed to certain rules of interaction with the suppliers of equipment, and now realize that they don't like those rules. Well, here's the capitalist game: You've got to figure out how to achieve what you want within the confines of such rules; in this case, agitated farmers should put a unified front to re-negotiate the agreement, or they should work with a separate supplier, etc. In contrast, capitalism does not allow these farmers to violently force the suppliers into new rules of interaction, which is what these farmers are trying to do via the State.