Well, apparently you do what people on HN are suggesting here: You wait until someone else builds a hackable tractor, you buy it promising you won't hack it, then you complain about it and hope you can pressure the government into making it legal for you to hack the hackable tractor.
Why are people buying these annoying tractors anyway? The reason to me seems: They are worth the trouble.
Sure, but when the other option is "stop farming", what would you have them do? The typical farmer doesn't know how to build a tractor from scratch, just as the typical car-owner doesn't know how to reproduce a Honda Accord.
So I buy a different brand. Or I comply with the rules I accepted at buy-time. In this tractor case I'd be mad at myself that I missed such a shitty condition of the contract, I'd write a blog post about how shitty it is. I'd try to pressure the manufacturer into giving me more rights. But not via the government, that just seems unfair. John Deere invents something, they proudly bring it to market, people (who did not have a John Deere smart-tractors before) start complaining and now that want you to alter your beautiful product? Go away! John Deere does not force anyone to buy their stuff! Why would you be allowed to force them into complying with your needs?
> But not via the government, that just seems unfair.
> Why would you be allowed to force them into complying with your needs?
Here's the thing. They should be able to lease equipment with restrictions. However, if you're going to call it a sale, then I don't see why they should have the right to restrict your ability to modify it. A sale implies a change of ownership. If they can restrict what you can do with the product after you bought it, then there wasn't really a change of ownership, was there?
50 years back, to 1966, is still very much preferable to 150 years back, to 1866.
As huge a gulf in technology as that may be, retracing over ground that has already been surveyed once is much easier than blazing a trail through wilderness. It only takes 50 years to advance that far in technology the first time you try it. The second time around, it goes much faster and less expensively, especially for everything with lapsed patent protection.
That particular tractor is supposed to be a bootstrapping device, so that in the unlikely circumstance that we do lose the benefit of modern infrastructure, it can mostly be rebuilt before anybody forgets how or why.
With the benefit of the modern manufacturing infrastructure, anyone else could copy a 1995 model of Deere tractor and just leave off the trademark elements.
The LifeTrac is designed around the resources that a self-sustaining OSE community could likely produce or scavenge. It's basically what two people and a rudimentary machine shop could build in a reasonable period of time.
Again, given the run-up in prices for used, owner-repairable tractors, there may be a market for copying the most popular models for new manufacture, and leaving out anything still patented or trademarked. Serious farmers won't build their own LifeTrac unless it is impossible to get a factory-built tractor.
Actually this is what some farmers attempt to do - buy tractors that do not rely on complex electronics and software. However none of the major farm equipment manufacturers make such tractors anymore, so they've had to turn to the second-hand market. Consequently the prices of these second hand tractors has skyrocketed. What a strange world.
