151–160 of 359 posts
While this is a fascinating question in the context of tractors, it gets even more interesting in the context of cars, houses, personal electronics, light bulbs. The First Sale Doctrine is being eroded by DRM.
Hey all, I worked on software for John Deere. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Opinions expressed here are MY OWN. I no longer work for John Deere or am associated with them in any way. I was part of one of the many teams that work on this software. Specifically I was part of John Deere's ISG division also known as the Intelligent Solutions Group. The ISG division (was at the time) responsible for tyi…
Thank you. I work in Ag and it seems crazy that someone should be able to buy a machine like those Deere sells and be able to modify the controls SW. Can United Airlines update the controls SW on Boeing 747? I'm not sure how tractors are any different.
As an aside, I remember the last time I had a John Deere tech out. Even for him to access the service manual (to fix a mechanical part), which was fundamentally not much more than a simple search tool that displays PDFs, required a surprising level of authorization to access each document, with everything encrypted. It seemed a little extreme just to get a simple diagram. I can sort of see why some worry about where the company is headed.
It seems so unbelievable to me that there are enough people that are a) John Deere equipment owners/renters and b) capable of debugging and patching issues in a C++ codebase for these stories to keep appearing. Debates on the virtues of open source aside, is this actually the solution? Or is it a symptom of, say, poor quality software releases? or service visits that are too costly? or overloaded dealers who can't ha…
There doesn't have to be any overlap between these groups of people. The issue here seems to be that some mechanical parts that are easily replaced, are not accepted by the controlling computer, unless it is authorized using specific administration software. Basically, ink cartridge lock-in, but for tractors.
To circumvent the restrictions, no farmer has to know C++, they only need a pirated version of the software to integrate the replacement parts into the system. So what the farmers want is not the ability to arbitrarily modify the software running on their equipment, but simply a way to do purely mechanical repairs on their own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Liability laws are in dire need in the software industry. Security for instance would not be such an abysmal disaster if companies were held liable for the insecure garbage they are pumping out.
Indeed. No one should hire a programmer except that they be licensed and bonded, just like any other form of skilled labor. Users of software developed by unlicensed programmers should also be held liable if their machines should be compromised and used in a botnet or other malicious activity. That means no Linux or, in your case, BSD.
Hey all, I worked on software for John Deere. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Opinions expressed here are MY OWN. I no longer work for John Deere or am associated with them in any way. I was part of one of the many teams that work on this software. Specifically I was part of John Deere's ISG division also known as the Intelligent Solutions Group. The ISG division (was at the time) responsible for tyi…
Thank you. I work in Ag and it seems crazy that someone should be able to buy a machine like those Deere sells and be able to modify the controls SW. Can United Airlines update the controls SW on Boeing 747? I'm not sure how tractors are any different.
While this is a fascinating question in the context of tractors, it gets even more interesting in the context of cars, houses, personal electronics, light bulbs. The First Sale Doctrine is being eroded by DRM.
The problem with DRM is the early internet era community wasted all of its screaming and yelling about stealing movies and MP3's, and now anytime you mention DRM in a context that matters like those, it's ignored.
Everybody likes to feel taken advantage of. If I was a business owner or engineer that built systems this complex and you asked me to not lock it down, I'd call you freaking crazy. These are very expensive and complex machines, and you want my competition or some farmer who has no idea what he's doing to access and modify it? No thank you. Google keeps proprietary code. And that's for auto complete...
In the case of users you have no right after sale to feel a right to control how your users make use of your product. Just because software and contracts give you two venues to potentially do so doesn't mean it would be rational to allow you to. The world is 99.99% users.
On the second point, competition has always quite legally taken apart the competitors products to see how they tick. If you have something truly innovative you can file a patent, if not then you have nothing that deserves protection.
Hey all, I worked on software for John Deere. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Opinions expressed here are MY OWN. I no longer work for John Deere or am associated with them in any way. I was part of one of the many teams that work on this software. Specifically I was part of John Deere's ISG division also known as the Intelligent Solutions Group. The ISG division (was at the time) responsible for tyi…
It doesn't sound like the farmers are asking to rewrite or replace that software. It sounds like they are just asking to be able to make the same kind of repairs that their local dealer makes.
Hey all, I worked on software for John Deere. This is a throwaway account for obvious reasons. Opinions expressed here are MY OWN. I no longer work for John Deere or am associated with them in any way. I was part of one of the many teams that work on this software. Specifically I was part of John Deere's ISG division also known as the Intelligent Solutions Group. The ISG division (was at the time) responsible for tyi…
It doesn't sound like the farmers are asking to rewrite or replace that software. It sounds like they are just asking to be able to make the same kind of repairs that their local dealer makes.
When we buy a piece of software, we own and "physically" posses a binary which we feel we can rightly take apart, modify, and mess with it because we view it as analogous to owning a toaster or stereo in the physical world. It's in our home, we can touch it, and we in essence control it. Now the same is never said for software as a service. We buy subscriptions to services all the time but don't demand an ability to…
When you are talking about software running on the physical hardware that you have sold to people they have all trials and tribulations of ownership while you the creator are insisting on retaining control in order to suck more money out of their pockets.
To make the issue vastly more clear they having paid for ownership are insisting on free usage of the ALL the hardware involved including all processors and storage and insisting that the machine shouldn't deliberately disable itself unless it would be unsafe or damaging to run.
This isn't an unreasonable expectation.