John Deere Right-to-Repair Settlement
Caleb Jacobs (via Hacker News):
While the agricultural manufacturing giant pointed out in a statement that this is no admission of wrongdoing, it agreed to pay $99 million into a fund for farms and individuals who participated in a class action lawsuit. Specifically, that money is available to those involved who paid John Deere’s authorized dealers for large equipment repairs from January 2018. This means that plaintiffs will recover somewhere between 26% and 53% of overcharge damages, according to one of the court documents—far beyond the typical amount, which lands between 5% and 15%.
The settlement also includes an agreement by Deere to provide “the digital tools required for the maintenance, diagnosis, and repair” of tractors, combines, and other machinery for 10 years. That part is crucial, as farmers previously resorted to hacking their own equipment’s software just to get it up and running again.
Previously:
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If you don't live in a rural area it may be hard to understand how much of a platform tractors are supporting: they can lift their attachment for maneuvering of course, but especially provide power to it not in the form of electrical power, but in the form of a rotating axle (and all that is completely standardized). That enables a dizzying array of attachments that need no motor (only some transmission) as a requirement to doing their purely mechanical work: attachments to mow your lawn of course, but also ones that mow to the side for trimming the sides of the road, etc.; and that goes way beyond what you may have thought of as agricultural activities: there are attchments for splitting firewood (e.g. https://www.a-m-r.fr/en/catalogue/category/fendre ) or even to turn the tractor into a forklift (e.g. https://www.deleks.fr/fr/p/10/l%C3%A8ve-palettes-pour-tracteur-d-700 ). And even if you think such activities don't justify a John Deere (or Massey-Ferguson, etc.), there are now mini-tractors so that you can enjoy the benefits of the parts of that ecosystem that don't requipre a fully-powered tractor. But there are some who do, and when you're ionvested in the ecosystem of attachments this is great news when your tractor breaks down for some reason and you were previously at the mercy of John Deere to regain access to your investment.
