It's also about serial number encoded parts. The computer will only accept licensed ones it recognizes. Apple plays the same shitty game to keep you from replacing easy components yourself.

Louis Rossman has testified to Congress on the matter.

so does Raspberry Pi Foundation https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1088506051295567872

Why? Just to single source the camera?

Yes, to preserve the income from selling the cameras, to pay for the R&D.

What about proprietary PMIC? https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=238779#p1... MxL7704-R3/MxL7704-R4 are custom single client versions of the common chip, Apple does the same thing with Charger ICs.

Just speaking for myself, I'd rather pay a dollar or two more for an unencumbered Pi than have any restrictions on how I can use it.

Louis has been travelling the country to testify at various state legislatures. Its been fascinating following his efforts on youtube. here is a playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkVbIsAWN2lsmovRO20_g...

These companies are also actively pushing "Renting" as a business model where the farmer only rents the tractor for the season. Any maintenance and repairs are done as part of the rental and at the end of the season, the tractor goes back. This completely cuts the farmer out of the equation in terms of ownership/repair.

Rent or buy, the issue is that if a harvester breaks down in the field it could be 3 ~4 days before a technician gets to the field, diagnoses and has to order a part, wait for said part and come back to your field to replace it. That machine being down for two weeks during harvest could mean the farmer losing a whole lot of money.

If you are someplace like rural Australia the closest tech might be 1000km away.. if they haven't installed the hacked firmware they can't even service them without a tech or the tractor shuts down.

Is there a specific piece of legislation to target? To get legal process need to have the people who’ve suffered damage be the claimants. I wonder if these farmers agree to arbitration instead of bringing a court case.

Look and see if there's any Right to Repair legislation on the docket for your local area, the naming is pretty consistent across the US right now.

The anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA are the root cause as a special interest bill got abused even worse.

There is no sane reason to use government enforcement to stop people from tinkering with what they own. The only legitimate reason is an end state that is illegal for good reasons like removing a catalytic converter.

This again? The solution is almost never legislation.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted 1/2 their budgets to a common open solution, they could break out. If there were a tiny company offering an old school model with modern features at a competitive price, that would be enough. Then, if farmers choose to lock themselves in, it would be a real choice and their own fault.

BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't. Windows still thrives, but people have a choice. Just convince ADM and a few others to throw some pennies at a startup. Except that the new licensing greatly benefits those giants. So you'd have to convince 100s of little guys to throw big money your way.

> BSD didn't need legislation. GNU didn't.

They absolutely did. Both depend on copyright. GNU licenses in particular were created in reaction to copyright protection being extended to computer programs as if they were literary works. Today, all of free and open source software directly depends on copyright in order to even be recognized as such.

This is very biased for the giant companies, you have laws to protect companies with copyright and anti hacking laws but when is time for protecting the normal people we can't modify or add a new law. I would be fine with no protection law but then I should be able to crack, pirate and reverse engineer software and hardware.

BSD didn’t need legislation but it did need a long legal process to resolve in its favor.

I think there's even a theory that one of the reasons BSD is a small niche OS and Linux powers the world is because BSD was tied up in litigation for a while.

I don't know if it's a theory as so much as it actually happened. I remember the SCO lawsuits and it scared a lot of people away from BSD, the user base was a decent portion on free *nix at the time and it was virtually overnight Linux became the uncontested dominate force when that happened. SCO had a huge chilling effect on BSD which was it's intention all along.

Unless you have proof (not just evidence) it remains q theory.

If just 20% of prospective buyers devoted half their budgets, 20% more farmers and construction companies would be out of business.

Right to Repair legislation goes 90% of the way to stopping the lockdown of the machine internals and codifies for everyone that once a machine is sold and in use, the manufacturer no longer has control over that machine.