[PLUG-TALK] Farm equipment repair: software key issue

David Mandel dmandel at davidmandel.com
Thu Apr 13 16:40:00 UTC 2017


As far as I know these draconian proprietary licenses are only on
higher end tractors costing $100,000 plus.  Some farmers, even in the
Willamette Valley, need and use these machines; but most use much
smaller and much older machines that don't have these licenses (at
least yet).  Many small "organic" farmers are using ancient equipment
that they keep rebuilding and upgrading themselves.  A lot of small
vegetable farmers will do anything to buy an old  Allis Chalmers G
series tractor.  A lot of these have either been upgraded with Kubota
diesel engines or converted to electric.  No one made anything like
the Allis Chalmers G for decades - maybe because of safety issues - I
don't know.  However, lately Tuff-bilt is marketing their Model K18-44
–EFI tractor which has many of the same features as the Allis Chalmers
G.

On the whole, I think there is a real need for OpenSource designs in
agriculture - for hardware as well as software - and for small
equipment as well as for the giant stuff.  There are attempts to do
this, but most of them fall somewhat short of the need at this point.


On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 1:27 PM, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> wrote:
>> If you know folks who might be interested in replacing proprietary
>> software with F/OSS versions, this might be a Good Thing(TM) to do.
>
> On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 06:25:01AM -0700, Pete Lancashire wrote:
>> And instantly void the warranty on your > $100,000 tractor
>
> Before I spent $100,000 on anything, I would make sure it
> was repairable and supportable.  One of the big drivers in
> my transition to open source was the purchase of expensive
> proprietary software with warranties that were subsequently
> not supported.
>
> If a John Deere tractor comes with draconian third party
> upgrade penalties and untrustworthy support, I'd buy a
> Chinese tractor instead.  The software bundled with that
> tractor might be a year behind, but I'd rather stay a
> year behind rather than lose control over my production
> process.
>
> I bought IBM laptops because of their flexible user
> support, especially regards Linux.  They designed their
> BIOS upgrades to be Linux compatible, even tested them
> against multiple distros.  Knowing that Linux users
> often customize kernels, when I sent a Thinkpad in for
> factory service, they would call me for permission to
> upgrade the BIOS, just in case I had made an experimental
> kernel mod that might conflict with the newer BIOS.
>
> Indeed, if I was selling expensive gear like tractors to
> site-specific users like production and experimental farms,
> I would make sure it was extremely customizable, so that
> the agricultural discoveries my users make could be made
> available to help my other users as soon as possible.
>
> Keith
>
> --
> Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com
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