Former John Deere employee here. The company isn't being spiteful or doing this to corner the repair market; they do it to avoid legal liability and fraudulent warrantee claims. They're an extremely risk-averse company.
EDIT: By the way, I favor owner's rights (my family farms with Deere equipment, and I think there's tons of mutual advantage in open sourcing software in this case specifically and in general), but as is often the case, the "greedy corporate oppressor" narrative is too simple.
"...as is often the case, the "greedy corporate oppressor" narrative is too simple."
What part of the things you describe aren't done with the purpose of making the company money? I mean, "we're risk-averse so we force the risk onto you" is kind of the same as "we don't want to spend money so we inconvenience you".
Of course, companies are in business to make money and will tend to use whatever avenues are open. When a company starts using a monopoly position to impose legal restrictions on customers (whether to avoid risk of losing money or just to make money), sympathy for their money-making efforts tends to lessen.
Edit: Note that the approach of Deer is not warranty voiding if someone hacks the software but a license agreement which effectively terminates the ability of the farmer to use the vehicle and thus the defense above is pretty disingenuous.
I don't know if avoiding liability for their products is great way to make money or not. But if they are making a large effort to avoid liability, they are doing that as a way to guarantee profits - ie, make money.
Deere effectively has a monopoly on tractors at the scale discussed in the article. That's why farmers are buying the tractors and illegally moding them rather than buying competing brands - see comments elsewhere on this page.
And, of course, they're leveraging new legal concepts which allow them to sell their tractors while maintaining control over them through software licenses.
Well, I just want to put out that the "greedy or not" discussion frame is just terrible for discussion of issues in a liberal capitalist democracy.
Of course, most companies exist to make money. A few companies might other do good things in the mean time (go out of their way to hire under-privileged youth or something). But the assumption of liberal capitalism is that following market forces will usually do good and when it won't there are or should be laws saying otherwise.
So the "bad" companies aren't the "greedy companies" but rather those companies which either break the law or "pervert" the law - find their ways around laws that should be there or use their influence to create laws that shouldn't be there. That is, unethical corporations but not necessarily more greedy that a company hoping to make lots of money fully in the bounds of the law.
But despite this, "Corporate Greed" is shouted on the left as an objection (an objection that really makes no sense for left, right or center damn it).
And with this weak argument on the left, comes the equally disingenuous argument, "not bad because not greedy" which winds-up being a content-less defense. "What you're abusing those people but even aiming to profit by it, tell me again why this makes it OK?"
I'm not following. At which scale does John Deere have a monopoly?
Anyway, There's nothing nefarious about protecting your profits by avoiding liability. You seem to want Deere to be this evil corporation, which simply doesn't resonate with my experience in any way.
The problem which bothers many is that JD gives no warranty and at the same time forbids analyzing and modifying the firmware. It's perceived as a conflict - just like avoiding liability in this case is viewed as a way to increase profits.
JD does warrantee their equipment. I understand the perceived conflict, and I personally think JD should become more open. I'm only saying that this article is obviously sensationalized (no surprise coming from Vice).
From that perspective, it does start to look dicey in terms of "offer a lengthy and full service warranty" + "allow the end user to make modifications", so I understand that perspective.
But I do think there's a lot of room for detecting what changes were made and honoring / invalidating the warranty depending on them. Rather than simply saying "something was changed, therefore we invalidate the whole warranty."
The warrantee issue I mentioned was fraud--that is, sinking costs into investigating additional warrantee claims which turn out to be due to user manipulation. I suspect this is less of a concern compared with the legal liability of injury resulting from modification--I imagine it behooves the company to be able to point to the EULA and say, "look, we're doing everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen". This is complicated by the fact that they have to comply with laws in virtually every second and third world country, not just the US. It's just easier to be conservative with a blanket EULA. They could probably devise a more nuanced approach, but it would probably be costly and they probably have better (read: higher customer value) things they could put that money toward.
In that case, just write the license contract to say "If you change the firmware, John Deere accepts no liability". Make people sign that if they want the unlock key. Presumably John Deere aren't liable for other kinds of misuse - e.g. if you crash it.
It's not that simple. A corollary is with cellphone firmware for the radio. They have to answer to the FCC. Updating the firmware will let you broadcast with more wattage, for example. FCC doesn't like that.
Automakers have to answer to the EPA too. That doesn't stop regular joes from changing their own oil in their garage and buying parts at Autozone. Most cars are not designed to make it impossible for car owners to do regular maintenance or simple repair jobs themselves.
Doing so would actually be illegal for the Automakers, who tried similar things in the early days of the Auto Industry and several laws and regulations were passed to protect consumers for Highway vehicles
It is highly unlikely this will work out very well for JD.
That was one, but not the only Regulation passed as a result
Things like ODBII Regulations, which do only Apply to Highyway Vehicles, and all of the regulations that come out of the USDOT for Highway rated Vehicles.
As I understand, those contracts aren't legally binding, but they exist as evidence a company can point to in a trial to show that they tried to keep the user from doing X. An even more credible kind of evidence is actually making X technically difficult. Obviously they can't protect themselves against everything or they would go out of business (to use your example, they won't profit from selling stationary tractors). It's all risk management, and I'm not even saying I agree with their choices, only that their motives probably aren't as nefarious as Vice might want you to believe.
EDIT: By the way, I favor owner's rights (my family farms with Deere equipment, and I think there's tons of mutual advantage in open sourcing software in this case specifically and in general), but as is often the case, the "greedy corporate oppressor" narrative is too simple.