The feds are coming for John Deere over the right to repair

Hope Deere gets what's coming to them and this sets a precedent for other companies. Next on the list should be devices remotely disabled when they're discontinued, which would have otherwise continued to work perfectly fine (like the Spotify car device).

Would also like to see a ban on firmware updates and programming tools locked behind a dealer (or support contract) portal and a ban on time-restricted software licenses for hardware.

In line with remote-bricking discontinued hardware, these policies only serve to generate eWaste.

If you sell programmable hardware, or really anything with embedded software, you should be required to make all the tools and software available to end users (doesn’t have to be free, but shouldn’t require a subscription or support contract either) in perpetuity.

Licenses to enable additional hardware features are fine, but they must be granted for the life of the device (i.e. as long as it can be kept working), not an arbitrary “we think the life of this thing is 5 years”. You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.

> You should never have to keep paying to use a device you already bought.

You think that's bad? I bought a "RAM upgrade" over the phone from HAAS for a CNC machine back in 2016ish. The upgrade was from 1mb to 16mb of RAM.

The technician on the phone told me to go to the machine and punch in a series of keys followed by a 21 digit code. That was my ~$2,000 RAM upgrade.

The RAM was always there. It was just locked away as "reserve value" for the manufacturer.

I don’t see the problem with this?

When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.

In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.

If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…

16 megs of ram was ~free by 2016.