John Deere has agreed to pay farmers $99 million to resolve a class action lawsuit that accused the agricultural giant of preventing farmers and mechanics from accessing the materials needed to repair equipment, as reported earlier by Reuters. As part of the proposed settlement, John Deere says it will make repair resources available for a […]
Probably less than the profits they made from scalping their customers.
The real cost is providing support for users who have hacked their product, which is near impossible. And if they refuse, then they get tarnished for not supporting their product.
You don’t have to parrot irrelevant corporate talking points here; the rest of the worldwide press that carries water for them does plenty of that.
It’s very real. I ran a small high tech company for a while. We had to sell off our products to larger companies because we couldn’t handle supporting all the hacks people did to our stuff. We purposefully made it accessible, because that seemed to be good. But then users hit so many corner cases when they try to do weird shit with the product. And if you don’t support their own crap on your product, they give you bad word of mouth. Sucks, but there it is. I don’t know what the solution is.
What you are describing sounds very, very different from the hacking (and repairs) when it comes to John Deere tractors. The repairs are almost purely replacement or refurbishment of mechanical, hydraulic, and/or electric assemblies that comprise the machine. Meanwhile, the hacking is primarily using software to gain access to diagnostic information from the onboard computer.
This is a case where John Deere could eliminate very nearly 100% of the motivation to hack their tractors by letting their customers have access to the data created and stored by the machine they bought.
Conversely, as far as I understand it, if someone modified your product in an unintended way, in contravention to your instructions, you would have been within your legal rights to refuse them repairs as long as their changes caused the damage (or prevent the repairs). This is true whether or not what they did constituted “hacking” in a technical sense.
True. And just providing diagnostics should be easy (although still possibly a challenge to explain the meanings if they’re low-level diagnostics).
And yes, we didn’t have a legal requirements to help our customers with their problems (not that that stops people from trying to sue you so you have to spend tens of thousands on corporate lawyers), but not doing so would lead to unsatisfied customers, and hurt our reputation. It was no-win, and we weren’t really making money, so we passed the buck to a larger company that could maybe do better support but would more likely just establish a more restricted support policy under cover of a bigger reputation.
