Farmers Deserve the Right to Repair Their Tractors

> A few decades ago, any given farmer often had the skills and tools needed to quickly make repairs if their machinery broke down. These days, however, it’s not so straightforward. Most modern farm equipment is technologically advanced, containing computers and sensors that collect and transmit data. As a result, specific software tools are typically necessary to address mechanical failures and other issues.

> However, most companies refuse to make those tools available to farmers, making it exceptionally difficult to fix broken machinery on their own. They can’t even go an independent mechanic, since manufacturers won’t sell them parts or diagnostic tools either. This leaves farmers essentially no choice but to take their broken equipment to a licensed dealership.

> This isn’t cheap. A farmer might spend thousands of dollars on a simple adjustment they could have done themselves with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.

This is a part of a larger pattern. Our current underlying system "keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits". The current system enables "an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – [which] restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations. Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity" [1].

Imagine today's high-tech world, without the capitalist intellectual property system. It will allow many more people to become skilled and able. I think we will look back at this phase of human civilization in horror; IP systems are an excessive way of dominating people and stifling their growth.

[1] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

> Equipment manufacturers collect lots and lots of data about soil, weather, yields, and other factors, which they can then share with or sell to “affiliates and suppliers.”

So a company selling seeds (with a no-reselling clause in their contracts) could buy that information, make a good guess at a farmer's profit margin, and individually adjust their pricing to the maximum that each farmer would be willing to pay.

Yet another way in which big players can abuse information asymmetry.

Making something that only you can repair can be quite a lucrative business. This documentary is quite interesting:

McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

This rethoric has been proven false in the software development ecosystem.

Nowadays almost all new programming languages are open-source, and *nix OS softwares have won the cultural battle over Windows in the devops community.

> the supposedly bad capitalist IP system is also the reason for innovation and cooperation

For me this is as much a myth as the good old "the wealth trickles down from the rich to the poor"

In the end market should take of this. If repairability is a major concern for the farmers they would just eventually buy the tractors with less of a high-tech bells and whistles. And also cheaper I guess.