It really will. After riding in a friends Tesla I realized that the mixture of OTA updates, unauditable firmware, and the rise of subscription add-ons for cars means that in the future it will likely be necessary. With phones, the cost is cheap enough (sometimes free) that people won't jailbreak. When you realize your car can be remotely shut down for using aftermarket parts or driven back to the lot autonomously for missing a payment suddenly it's not just necessity, it is duty to jailbreak the car.
Not only do I want the right to 100% own something after I buy it, I think we'll need the right to buy in the first place. Similar to the right to pay in cash? Otherwise buying will just be replaced with leases.
Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not really the leader because he doesn't understand what's going on.
If you want to own something, you need to understand it.
Consider open source software. Why is compiled code not good enough? Because it's too hard to understand, so you're at thw mercy of the company that does understand it. Open souce puts others outside the company on a more even footing for understanding the code.
But complexity and the rate of change in products really gets in the way of understanding. Especially for anything involvong software, which is almost everything. You can see it even with open source software that has become such a giant maintenance burden that there's no way you can reasonably fork and maintain it without a pretty major investment.
The only hope of restoring the concept of ownership is to simplify and slow down. In many cases, this means a regression to simpler times, but not all. We can reach much better trade-offs than exist currently, but it will take a lot of work and education.
Let me give an example: the notion of buying something seems simple now, but it's actually a contract in the context of a lot of statutes and even more case law. Why can't signing up for a web service be accomplished without an unreadably-long contract? It can, but we need to develop the right statutes and case law and expectations to enable it.
The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own.
The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself.
Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it.
It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.
It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation. People don't understand lots of things and entrust themselves to different entities to make their life easier. But they should not let go of the rights that allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As long as we're on the topic of children, they have human rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have them in the first place.
While I generally support the right to repair, I'm not sure that forcing 100% ownership works in all cases. There are just plenty of cases I can imagine where it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it to people.
Basically, leasing something encourages the manufacturer to build for the long haul avoiding obsolescence. If the manufacturer is forced to sell things outright and then provide parts for fixing the devices, well, that just encourages them to skrimp on engineering so that parts will break sooner and they'll be able to make money on the fixable parts.
Why do some people leap to that unimplied projection? I see it all the time.
Saying it should be illegal to prevent something in no way says it should be illegal to do anything else.
If I say there should be regulation to protect the right to ride bicycles on roads, no where in that statement is the words everyone must only ride bicycles on roads.
I'm going to defend my leap in logic here, not so much to defend it outright but merely to explain it.
What I didn't say is that I generally believe it's hard to engineer for multiple business models. In my mind, it's sort of one path or the other. Own or rent.
If you engineer for long-term leasing, well, the price for ownership is going to be rather high. The potential owners, especially the militant ones, will grouse about the price and maybe use this as a new way to attack. They'll say the ownership price is gouging. And then they'll want lower prices on parts too.
I see your point about absolutism. I'm not really an absolutist. I just believe that the nature of business models means that insisting on ownership will essentially push the businesses into a corner. I elided that detail to keep things a bit shorter.
In reality tractors have, until the current evolution, been build absolutely for the long haul. Tractors which were the main tractor on the farm 50+ years ago are often still used for some side tasks here or there on the farm. Scraping out cattle sheds or mowing under the fence line with a sickle bar.
The lived reality of many farmers is that the John Deere computer systems are far less reliable and less maintainable than the mechanical systems of previous generations. With failure of the computer system being both common and completely crippling the tractor. In 50 years time what are the options going to looks like? Hopefully a lively community of fixers will be able to install the 2070s version of the raspberry pi and keep it running.
It sounds like all Deere equipment can be placed in administrative mode.
Deere has shipped a system that cannot be secured.
Thanks, Deere.
"He's unsure how comprehensively the company can patch the flaws without implementing full disk encryption, an addition that would mean a significant system overhaul in new tractor designs and likely wouldn't be deployed in existing equipment."
These offerings exist now, but have you tried to buy a vehicle outright in the last 10 years? At least half the salespeople I spoke to when I was looking for my truck would not even tell me the sales price of the the used vehicles on their lot. They wanted to know how much I could pay per month. Seriously. They used every sales tactic they could drum up to hide the price of the truck they were selling. Is that not a bit terrifying to you?
How is wanting to know the actual cost of a big purchase and being able to purchase it outright "forcing your world view on others"? If you want to constantly be paying on a lease, that's your own problem. Don't act like expecting to actually own the thing I'm paying thousands of dollars for is unreasonable and somehow inhibits others from from using subscription models for everything under the sun.
I think that this is a form of exploitation by car manufacturers to be honest. Consider that ownership can be expensive and so charging subscriptions with walled gardens and lock-ins makes sense for lower income consumers.
You might think this is a good pro-consumer thing to have. I don't believe so. There is no reason for example a manufacturer should be able to cajole another $40/mo. out of me for heating or cooling. Or $20 for their "radio station package", or any other thing they can imagine. Sure, you could argue Tesla's performance upgrade model might not be anti-consumer in the sense that they save money building one engine/one car and the consumer gets in at a level they can afford. But what is stopping them from pushing this further? Engine mileage fees?
The point is that often times the average consumer is not considering the choices they make 5, 10, 15 years down the road. That doesn't mean it's okay for this position to be exploited, it means we need to educate people on their rights including the right to ownership and repair and do what we can to stop the exploitation of the cattle class.
I have no idea why I can't have an unlocked phone with most carriers, or a gaming system that I can install what I want on, etc. I have no idea why most computers built today use soldered on components so I have to go to the them for repair. At the end of the day I don't like not owning things. When my entire life is determined by a list of dozens or even hundreds of subscriptions I am simply a meat machine that converts calories into corporate profits. Rent for an apartment because all of the houses are bought up is yet another way they keep you on the treadmill.
If you own nothing you have no control. If you have no control your position is easily exploited. We need to fight tooth and nail to maintain control and ownership of everything we have.
No, demand will not translate to supply. The first priority of producers is not to satisfy demand, but to retain and gain power. On the demand side, what people really need doesn't translate perfectly to market demand. The imperfections of these sides won't create a system that satisfies the participants. What I'm trying to get at is the phenomenon of market failure. From the supply side, history saw countless examples when this happened; think of any cartel and monopoly.
People will just lease cars even if it doesn't align with their world view, because many of us live in car-centric cities where that would not be a sensible hill to die on. Just like many of us pay an amount of rent that no longer feels fair, because taking a morale high ground and not doing so would leave us homeless.
So let car companies run roughshod over consumers because you don't like cars?
I'm glad you're in a situation where you have another option besides driving a personal vehicle. I'm not. I didn't build this stretched out chunk of suburb with no safe way to get anywhere on foot, so don't punish me for it.
Supposing this was even possible, that enough people banded together and said "enough with cars" and decided to change the way of life, it would take several decades, maybe even a century, to turn a town that is primarily driven to a town that is primarily walked.
It's not practical and everyone knows this. The utility of cars is too much to be simply tossed away. Imagine how hard visiting the mountains would be without one. Perhaps a more metropolitan person could live with just seeing pictures but I am an outdoorsman and this idea actually causes significant existential concern.
The solution is to make obviously anti-consumer behavior illegal in the same way we make monopolies illegal. Companies should build usable, fixable things. Planned obsolescence, subscription car services, etc are all a way they exploit this position they have. The free market would ideally fix this but given that it's very well known every car manufacturer is in bed with each other once one adopts this exploitative behavior the rest will surely follow. MRR is extremely desirable. Since it's not tenable for at the very least our generation to experience a less car-free life why not try to fix the thing causing the problem and THEN solve the greater problem?
Why do people always seem to single out Tesla when complaining about stuff like that? Are they really worse than any other automaker in that regard? How much of Toyota's firmware can you audit?
Tesla has pretty clearly led the way on some of this stuff, they’ve been doing unattended OTA software updates and remotely-revokable paid add-on features for years. Other manufacturers do not have more auditable firmware, but they are behind in how much control they have of their vehicles once they’re in a customer’s hands.
Please give a source showing "unattended" OTA updates. The car never updates without the owner initiating it, since the process makes the car unusable anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour.
I’d also consider remote feature removal a form of unattended update–the first of which really made the news a pretty long time ago when they disabled autopilot on all Tesla’s in Hong Kong.
I think it's mostly because of how aggressive and one-way tesla is. My 6-year-old volt can probably get firmware updates over the air, but I've never stepped into my car to discover that the emergency blinkers are now hidden, the windshield wipers are now on the other side of the column, and my battery has been limited to only 60% of what I bought because telsa flipped the wrong bit 4 years ago and two owners back and has decided to "remedy" my experience.
1: People in fact do routinely successfully modify or wholly replace the ecu code in other cars.
2: And they even only do that for fun (tuning). Most vehicles never give people any reason to even want to mod the software since other vehicles haven't had nearly as much history of being as invasive or caprcious. They are starting tonadopt these undesirable norms lately, but that is because of Tesla leading by example and making it at all thinkable.
A Toyota firmware from a few years ago had very little capacity to harm or offend or frustrate since it simply wasn't in control of very much, and didn't change or do anything different after purchase, and ultimately was at least replaceable by replacing the entire ecu if not by hacking the stock one, and also the stock one was hackable. Not officially or by design, but people do it anyway.
If you thought you were conjuring up some ridiculous idea, in fact it is a very common thing, and yes Tesla is by far absolutely ridiculously worse than everyone else on this front.
> 1: People in fact do routinely successfully modify or wholly replace the ecu code in other cars.
Did the manufacturer let them do this, or did they have to do something equivalent of a jailbreak to do it?
> Most vehicles never give people any reason to even want to mod the software since other vehicles haven't had nearly as much history of being as invasive or caprcious. They are starting tonadopt these undesirable norms lately, but that is because of Tesla leading by example and making it at all thinkable.
First and most are two different things, and on-star was guilty of far less actual abuse.
On-star was more wrong in principle that in actuality.
The worst thing about on-star was simply that even if you didn't pay for the service, it was still there and could both track and to a very limited extent control the vehicle under someone else's control. But in fact they never did anything much with it, and now it's not even a thing anymore, and if you wanted as an owner you could hack it out without disabling the car. on-star is on the same spectrum with tesla, at opposite ends.
But if you know enough to even mention the name on-star in this context, then you know enough to know it doesn't actually compare at all, which exposes something unflattering about your argument.
Tesla absolutely deserves no breaks or excuses on this or a few other topics.
Tesla is way ahead of other manufacturers in terms of putting modern tech in their cars (their navigation UI runs at more than 10 frames per second which is still a challenge for a lot of legacy automakers) which also gives them more opportunities to use this modern tech for user-hostile purposes. However, greed isn't specific to any single company and the other manufacturers will eventually follow suit.
And if you say one occurrence isn't "frequently", then when was the last time Tesla was in the news for that before this most recent case of reducing one owner's battery range?
> People single out Tesla because they are the "John Deere" of automobiles.
How so?
> I have a Hyundai, i can have it serviced pretty much anywhere, can you take your Tesla to the local mechanic?
For most things I can. Can your local mechanic replace broken parts in the high-voltage system of your Ioniq 5, or reflash its infotainment system?
it very well may be in industry wide problem, but Tesla seems to be front-and-center of this problem.
Great you sent me a link about paying $8 to use your remote start.
why are there so many stories like this one:
"Right off of the top, it’s no secret that Tesla will disable features before reselling a used vehicle that’s traded into it. While that might sound shady it’s within their right to do so. What isn’t so common is the situation that led to one owner walking out of his house one day to find his Model S with 80 miles less range than just a few minutes previous."
Is this not "john Deere" type activities?
how about this: "Tesla’s $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters"
or this: Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.
If the software doesn't work, neither does your car, is this not things "John Deere" is known for?
i dont drive an Ioniq so i wouldn't know the answer to your question.
> it very well may be in industry wide problem, but Tesla seems to be front-and-center of this problem.
I don't agree with this.
> paying $8 to use your remote start
An $8/month subscription, not an $8 one-time payment.
> why are there so many stories like this one
Again, when was the last time this happened?
> Tesla will disable features before reselling a used vehicle that’s traded into it
This isn't the same thing at all. There's nothing wrong with removing features from a vehicle while you're the owner of it. If someone traded in an ICE car with a turbocharger, would it be wrong for a dealer to remove that before selling it?
> What isn’t so common is the situation that led to one owner walking out of his house one day to find his Model S with 80 miles less range than just a few minutes previous." Is this not "john Deere" type activities?
Yes, that's definitely wrong of them and "John Deere" type activities. But you originally made a stronger statement, that Tesla is the John Deere of automobiles. For that to be true, they'd have to do significantly more of these "John Deere" type activities than other automakers do, which they don't.
> how about this: "Tesla’s $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters"
They originally asked for $16,000 to replace a part that someone else later successfully repaired for $700. They didn't stop him from doing so, remotely brick the vehicle afterward, or anything like that. Isn't this how things are supposed to work?
> or this: Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.
This wasn't wrongdoing either. First of all, the outage was an accident. Second of all, the cars could still be unlocked and driven through a local Bluetooth connection from the app, or with the key cards that are included free with every vehicle.
> If the software doesn't work, neither does your car, is this not things "John Deere" is known for?
But as I said above, the cars did work even when their software didn't.
> i dont drive an Ioniq so i wouldn't know the answer to your question.
My point was that on a Tesla, independent mechanics can do a lot of things but not everything, and I expect the same to be true about a Hyundai too.
> This isn't the same thing at all. There's nothing wrong with removing features from a vehicle while you're the owner of it. If someone traded in an ICE car with a turbocharger, would it be wrong for a dealer to remove that before selling it?
If you say so.. personally, if I bought a used car, then found out features were removed i'd be pissed off.. then again, i am not a tesla apologist.
The "owner" is not the one removing the features.. TESLA IS.. so they can charge the new owner to restore the features.
FOr your turbocharger - Yes, if it was listed on the car's features, then removed after you bought it, it would be wrong to remove it. In fact this could be considered fraud.
Apple consumers and Tesla consumers have one very odd feature in common - ruthlessly defending things.
I dont get why they feel a "need" to do this. You seriously wrote "there is nothign wrong wiht removing features.." .. OMG.
If you enjoy having tesla do this to you, by all means continue to buy their products. I dont think their behaviour is fair and so i wont buy one.
> The "owner" is not the one removing the features.. TESLA IS..
My point was that when they disabled FSD in those cases, Tesla was the owner.
> FOr your turbocharger - Yes, if it was listed on the car's features, then removed after you bought it, it would be wrong to remove it. In fact this could be considered fraud.
Let's use a simpler example then: imagine my spare tire wore out and I didn't bother replacing it. Is it fraud if I sell my car without doing so?
> You seriously wrote "there is nothign wrong wiht removing features.." .. OMG.
You elided a critical part of what I said. Here's what my whole sentence was: "There's nothing wrong with removing features from a vehicle while you're the owner of it."
Tesla Remotely Disabled 80 Miles Of Range From Customer’s Car Demanding $4,500, Backtracks When The Web Finds Out
BY STEPHEN RIVERS | POSTED ONJULY 27, 2022
Not sure the "when was the last time this happened" matters, it is a fairly regular thing with them. in this case it was July 27, 2022.. is that too old, too new for you?
I know that one just happened. I meant when was the last time before that one, to see if there's any backing to the claims that this happens "so many" times and "frequently".
I don't think it's alright to do. The point I'm trying to make is that every automaker does things that aren't alright to do, and that Tesla isn't more guilty of it than anyone else is.
Technically, an amendment could say anything, but historically, the US Constitution outlines rules the government is supposed to follow.
The Constitution should be amended to eliminate 3rd party circumvention of existing constitutional protections. Why is it that an agency needs a warrant to track you directly, but not to purchase tracking data from a data broker? How much less tracking and general invasion of privacy would Congress tolerate if the government wasn't directly benefiting from it?
Because you consent to the data gathering and tracking when you signed up for the service.
It's not different than if the police ask "can I search your vehicle" and you say "yes". You consented to a search. At that point there is no concept of what is legal & what is not.
You never constented to your data being given to the police though(or more accurately in this case - to be sold to the data broker and then given to the police)
More accure comparison would be if you left your car with a garage to have it serviced(giving them permission to enter the vehicle), then the police come to the garage and pay them some money to enter your car and search it.
At least in the US almost everything follows "right of first sale" doctrine. Otherwise I'd have a claim against a car dealership when I trade in my used vehicle.
The only thing I can think of that don't follow this is real estate. Racial covenants were functionally invalidated by the federal government a while back. But you can attach almost any other restriction to property you want. For example, you can include a no-commercialization clause when selling property.
You could make the argument that contracts which say one party can spy on the other and do whatever they want with the data fall under the category of unconscionable.
My optimistic prediction is that there will be regulation around this pretty soon. Were going to have laws similar to smog standards that specify what can and can't a car manufacturer can charge a subscription for. I would imagine legislation would look something like.
> You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever.
or
> You are allowed to charge subscription for features A, B and C. But critical features including X, Y and Z must be provided standard on a vehicle at no extra charge.
Cars are already like this. My Skoda Octavia had a headlight levelling issue. Pretty clearly just needed recalibration. Can you do that through the dash interface? Of course not. God forbid they actually use that huge touchscreen for useful diagnostic information.
Took it to my normal garage who are very good, but they clearly couldn't fix it because they didn't have VW's proprietary software tools.
Ended up taking it to an official Skoda garage and they easily fixed it and didn't even charge me. I presume even they felt bad charging someone £80 to press a button in some software that only they have access to.
Constitutional amendments are dangerous. The whole constitution is at risk of change during a constitutional convention. We are at risk of losing much more than we gain
Is it, though? Getting 2/3rds of the US to agree on anything seems to be nigh impossible these days. I don't see how a convention could be called to amend [extremely popular issue] but then all of a sudden enough of the convention votes to scrap the Constitution altogether.
Honestly the DRMification of everything is getting out of hand. It's not just tractors. Much of the industrial gear for sale has the same problems. Vendors seem to think it's acceptable. We need a DRM-free mark and a complaints registration system to provide a PR-pushback mechanism.
There's a business case for periodically killing people who miss loan payments, to keep the other debtors on their toes. The idea that the concept of theft has to be eliminated in order not to justify these business practices is an infinite license for them to continue.
DRM and copyright. The information freely available outside such IP silos puts you decades in the past, with the gulf only widening. So odd, how it happened that way. /s
Kind of like, "hey, that battery that came with the used car you bought was larger than the previous owner paid for, so we reduced what you can use by 1/3 unless you pay us $4,500?"
I know more and more farmers are tech savvy and getting acquainted with the tools of the trade — or at least their kids are, but is your average farmer going to know what to do with a root terminal? I’d be worried about further crippling / bricking my six-figure machine. Log dumps are great for troubleshooting, but fixing the problem isn’t necessarily straightforward. And any misstep could be calamitous.
I’m all for right to repair and sticking it to John Deere for trying to squeeze farmers, but I don’t see the end goal. A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?
I remember when Motherboard did a piece about this issue they interviewed a farmer. He basically said something along the lines of:
> I had no idea how any of this worked but I needed to get my tractor running so I got to Googling and figured it out.
Don't underestimate farmers. They might not be tech savvy in the traditional sense. But if you told them they needed to jailbreak their tractors to plant this season, they would figure it out.
On the other hand, Googling and downloading random shit is also the perfect way to end up with malware or break things. Wouldn't it be better if you didn't need to download unverified tools from potentially shady websites just to repair what you own? If your product requires specific proprietary software to repair, that software should be provided when the product is sold.
I feel like this comment is seriously underestimating the average farmer, these are people with complicated jobs and wide ranges of skill sets. Also when your livelihood is threatened unless you learn how to do something, you're gonna learn how to do that thing.
Yeah, I'm an engineer that has worked closely with farmers for much of my career. I'm in absolute awe. They are an unbelievable wealth of knowledge of all kinds of technology, hydraulics, mechanics, weather, genetics, soil science, hydrology, forecasting, business, etc. etc. etc. The list just keeps going. And in general, if your numbers are telling you one thing and the farmer is telling you another, I'd usually bet on the farmer.
These people are CEO's of massive enterprise operations managing tons of capital in a high-risk, high-tech, unbelievably complex environment that they must constantly stay on top of.
I’m in no way demeaning a farmer by asking if their skill sets can be applied to complicated software. What I’m really wondering is what it takes to fix a hardware problem with this software. I wouldn’t underestimate anyone whose life depends on fixing a problem…
I think it's a reasonable point. I know some farmers, and in every case I can think of the answer is "probably not".
However, most of the non-farmers I know wouldn't be able to, either. My brother has a lot of rooted devices — to stream movies, play video games — but he's not tech-savvy. Usually, there's some guy on eBay who will ship a hacked device to your house, or a co-worker who will do it for a few bucks.
Unlike an iPhone, you wouldn't ship a hacked tractor (any more than you'd download a tractor...) but markets form on their own, and I suspect that's what would happen here.
Pulling back the camera a bit, this question astounds me. I guess I'm finding it very very odd the extent to which people don't understand (or better, remember) that the hackers most always win here, and those wins are nearly always a good thing. It's true that the companies end up rerouting and finding other ways to preserve profits (and subsequently get real quiet about these defeats) but for me the recent history of tech is about wins like this.
But the question is what is the victory and what or for whom is it good for? So I'm not sure I understand your astonishment as if it's so obvious that breaking into the software has inherent value.
There's a difference between rooting a device to stick it to DRM overlords, playing pirated games, or running your own homebrewed whatever on your phone versus enabling a platform through which someone can fix a complicated machine that's worth 1000x a PS5. The farmers taking out loans on these machines are betting their entire lives on it.
I'm definitely not saying this is inconsequential, but I really want to know just how many farmers are going to plug in, jailbreak, and get to tinkering with machinery that is their livelihood -- not just an expendable piece of hardware that gets discarded when its bricked...
I'd say your last question is way too narrow and short-term. It's almost by definition hard to explain because it takes a while to see and/or appreciate the effects?
Let's see if this is a close enough analogy; I'll forever maintain that Linux won the OS wars decisively broadly, and that 1-2% of the desktop is an overwhelming victory. The numbers don't sound great, but what you want to do is to compare to "what would this look like if it was only 'big-company' owned software," and the answer is very different. We probably wouldn't even be talking about "Operating systems" at all. Just "Windows" and "Apple" boxes.
Keeping this stuff open, by whatever means, law, hackery, force, whatever, has long term down the road multiplicative effects.
Not only are you estimating the astounding ingenuity of farmers it's not hard to make a convenient interface for a jailbreak.
Often times even replacing a tire is so expensive on a tractor after paying the highwaymen their fee the probability of bricking the tractor is probably not even factored in. John Deere more-or-less bricks your tractor anyway. So, arguably, it's no loss if you brick it given the alternative could be not putting food on the table because you spent 3 years of checks on repair or you'd have to buy a new one anyway.
> is your average farmer going to know what to do with a root terminal?
Who cares?
The question is 1) whether your exceptional farmer will have a root terminal available to them if they want to use it, and 2) if your average farmer calls a programmer, will they have a root terminal available to work on the farmer's behalf?
> A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?
I don't understand how you don't think these would be massive achievements.
The goal isn't to stick it to John Deere. Who cares about John Deere? The goal is to push John Deere the company out of the tractor you bought.
Farmers here are networked - not every farmer knows everything but almost all of then are two phone calls away from any required skillset.
Case in point, I work with local farmers and I'm deeply familiar with OS design, sheep shearing robotics, geophysical air survey, integrating sat + air + land data, sympbolic algebra systems, fixing old motocycles, automating pumps and irrigation, and a slew of other skills.
We've already got a local alternative non John Deere supply line for IT parts that often break (sensors, touch screens, monitors, etc) and for various mechanical parts.
Most people in the rural community know a FiFo (Fly in | Fly out) worker or three in mining | oil & gas which provides access to global state of the art mechanical workshops and automation R&D (see Rio Tinto + robotics).
The are many things that can be done by developing stand alone Tractor OS's - integrating drone cloud data and control for one, removing the John Deere "data spying" for another (all crop data gets phoned home to John Deere "for free").
Farmers, on the whole, are phenomenally capable people. They have to be. They know how to get knowledge when they need it, and when presented with broken equipment they'll diligently work through the challenge using all the resources available to them. If you can search your way to victory, so can they.
I expect that since these tractors run Linux and probably aren't GPL compliant. If that is true and if the Software Freedom Conservancy win their lawsuit against Vizio, this means that farmers across America will be able to sue John Deere for GPL compliance and start an open source distro for tractors.
I mean, the whole shtick of Find My (iPhone) is that someone can’t use it if they steal it, even if they do a DFU reset to factory settings. This makes it incredibly unattractive for would-be criminals to start stealing iPhones unless they have a way to ship them to China for parts disassembly.
If a similar E2E security system existed for the tractors, the aggressors might’ve simply torched them instead of using them to better their own efforts.
More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a constitutional amendment.