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'Right to repair' taken up by the ACCC in farmers' fight to fix their own tractors:
The 'right to repair' movement has finally bent the ear of Australia's competition and consumer watchdog, the ACCC, in its pleas to be able to fix their own farm equipment.
[...] Farmers have emerged as an unlikely force in the global right to repair movement.
The movement eschews the disposable culture of consumer electronics in favour of letting independent repairers and home tinkerers fix broken smartphones, tablets, and laptops.
Proponents want access to the code that makes modern machines hum, putting them at loggerheads with tech giants including Apple who own the proprietary software.
In the United States, farmers have risked voiding their warranties by hacking their own John Deere tractors with torrented software so they can carry out their own repairs.
[...] In its first deep dive into the modern agricultural machinery market, the ACCC published its discussion paper on the matter in late February and is seeking accounts from those who buy and use farm machinery, or repair it for a living.
"Broadacre croppers with large tractors, harvesters, seeders … and particularly tractors seem to be an area of some contention," Mr Keogh said.
"We have heard from dealers who say that they have no issues with providing service, yet we hear from independent service providers that they can't get access to the [software] diagnostic tools they need.
"In some cases they can't get access to the [manufacturers'] parts they need.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 22 2020, @04:54PM (2 children)
I know the farm culture of the Midwest, and even a little of that of Australia. It's not at all like the West Coast, which has a casualness towards waste. Farmers value efficiency highly. In Iowa, 75 year old tractors are still in use.
Before you bash the west coast too much, keep in mind that John Deere (the main villain in these farm-equipment-repair stories) is headquartered in Illinois and has all its main US operations in Illinois and Iowa (and a little in ND and GA). The managers and engineers creating all this DRMed junk aren't a bunch of wasteful west-coasters pushing DRM on honest midwesterners, this is midwesterners doing it to themselves.
(Score: 2) by RedGreen on Thursday April 23 2020, @12:56AM (1 child)
"The managers and engineers creating all this DRMed junk aren't a bunch of wasteful west-coasters pushing DRM on honest midwesterners, this is midwesterners doing it to themselves."
I give you a hundred to one on the odds for the vast majority of them, being from schools that teach this garbage to their
graduates, using those parasites methods of doing things. With another good possibility that those same people are from a place other than where they work at there now.
"I modded down, down, down, and the flames went higher." -- Sven Olsen
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 23 2020, @02:58AM
Well the engineers probably largely went to school on the east coast, because that's where most tech schools are. The managers could have gone anywhere though. They teach that crap in MBA schools everywhere (in the US) these days.
Also, Iowa isn't really a place a lot of non-midwestern people would want to relocate to. I would not be surprised if most of the people working at Deere there came from that area originally. For engineers at least, there's lots of places where they can work across the country, and those locations aren't big draws.