In support of your hijacking: no, you're not. I find it annoying. It has the stink of "we've got to do something different but we don't know what...let's mess with something that isn't broken!"

As abhorrent as I find John Deere's anti-ownership approach, I say let them continue down that road. It will provide another entrepreneur the opportunity to create and sell a more easily maintainable, you-bought-it-so-you-own-it alternative.

God knows the home appliance space needs that kind of alternative.

I'm in violent agreement with you here -- the notion of a smart home platform, for example, that allows me to customize it via an API, or, if I choose, by tinkering with its basic software, sounds awesome to me.

But I'm a programmer, and a tinkerer.

In order for this to be a viable mainstream reality, some enterprising company will need to establish a platform or system of consumer-grade components that bridges the gap between "general population computer literacy" and "ability to tweak one's electronic things".

In reality, that may be (for now) an unbridgeable gap. Maybe the only route to digital freedom is deeper digital literacy on the part of the average consumer.

But one thing is for sure -- as long as laws like the DMCA are in place, the deck is stacked against evolution towards DIY utopia.

And in the meantime, everyone who exists now just gets boned. Sorry, everyone who lives in the present instead of some theoretical future!

Right but the issue with that approach is that the better alternative rarely appears. Your own example of the home appliance shows that.

Its coming to consumer vehicles as well. [0] This will be (already is) an industry standard.

0: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/automakers-say-you-don...

The internet of things means this issue is coming to every single product in the world. If it's possible to add electronics to it, it will have a chip.

And that means that software IP rules now apply to hardware. Those rules need changing.

It's more urgent with physical products than with traditional software because tractors need repair on a regular basis. Copyright is taking away the independence of farmers.

> I did not know this issue extended all the way to farming equipment.

It's not just farming equipment. The heavy equipment industry uses closed and highly protected diagnostics tools. They don't want to give the control of the internal of the machine away to the customer.