I don't know if avoiding liability for their products is great way to make money or not. But if they are making a large effort to avoid liability, they are doing that as a way to guarantee profits - ie, make money.

Deere effectively has a monopoly on tractors at the scale discussed in the article. That's why farmers are buying the tractors and illegally moding them rather than buying competing brands - see comments elsewhere on this page.

And, of course, they're leveraging new legal concepts which allow them to sell their tractors while maintaining control over them through software licenses.

> But if they are making a large effort to avoid liability, they are doing that as a way to guarantee profits - ie, make money.

This can also be viewed as the more general "companies act in a way that gives them the best chance of continued indeterminate existence."

Well, I just want to put out that the "greedy or not" discussion frame is just terrible for discussion of issues in a liberal capitalist democracy.

Of course, most companies exist to make money. A few companies might other do good things in the mean time (go out of their way to hire under-privileged youth or something). But the assumption of liberal capitalism is that following market forces will usually do good and when it won't there are or should be laws saying otherwise.

So the "bad" companies aren't the "greedy companies" but rather those companies which either break the law or "pervert" the law - find their ways around laws that should be there or use their influence to create laws that shouldn't be there. That is, unethical corporations but not necessarily more greedy that a company hoping to make lots of money fully in the bounds of the law.

But despite this, "Corporate Greed" is shouted on the left as an objection (an objection that really makes no sense for left, right or center damn it).

And with this weak argument on the left, comes the equally disingenuous argument, "not bad because not greedy" which winds-up being a content-less defense. "What you're abusing those people but even aiming to profit by it, tell me again why this makes it OK?"

I'm not following. At which scale does John Deere have a monopoly?

Anyway, There's nothing nefarious about protecting your profits by avoiding liability. You seem to want Deere to be this evil corporation, which simply doesn't resonate with my experience in any way.

The problem which bothers many is that JD gives no warranty and at the same time forbids analyzing and modifying the firmware. It's perceived as a conflict - just like avoiding liability in this case is viewed as a way to increase profits.

JD does warrantee their equipment. I understand the perceived conflict, and I personally think JD should become more open. I'm only saying that this article is obviously sensationalized (no surprise coming from Vice).