Well, then, that was stupid of John Deere and makes them a victim of their own arrogance. Period. There wouldn't be a law right now if John Deere hadn't unnecessarily, by their own actions, pissed off so many people in the process of increasing "safety" and "performance". As though anybody complained about the lack of "safety and performance" in the century-long history of tractors before computers came along and saved us.
Let's be clear here: John Deere, a multi-billion dollar company, isn't the victim here, but the aggressor against family farms, good intentions or not. Mourning for them is absurd.
> A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?
Nope. It's as easy as clicking "Publish" on the repositories and setting the Dropbox folder to "Public." I could do it in 15 minutes. Any legal review or trade secret review or whatever else is entirely the company protecting their own interests. John Deere has done that long enough, a hard deadline is their self-inflicted penalty.
How do you know this. Do you work for Jon Deere? Since the code is closed source that's simply an assumption
You can modify a household lawn mower and if you get maimed by it by those modifications, you're at fault.
However, for industrial equipment if you can modify it - the manufacturer is likely liable. Consider how often you hear about deaths due to manufacturing defects (the stats for deaths for framers is 60 - 70 per year per 100,000 in the US).
https://www.wkw.com/farming-accidents/blog/farming-accidents... (personal injury lawyer site)
That’s interesting if true, but do you have a better source (ideally, a court case)? I don’t see that theory of liability discussed anywhere on the page you linked.
It also has two case studies in it.
I don’t think any farmer is looking to tinker with the control software, and even if they want they should be able to tinker considering it’s their property and their farmland and only they themselves are liable for any damages caused to neighbours or otherwise.
John Deere is just trying to create artificial barriers and extract more value from existing customers.
The law essentially means the code is open. A huge change, that will take years and millions to achieve?