Honestly, they can keep a lot closed but still create modular designs and repairers win without giving away the farm.
If you don't want to pay John Deere for their fancy autonomous farming, that's fine. But you should be able to swap in a different control unit and not have to worry about your tractor simply refusing to run like a Keurig machine that refuses to run non-rfid tagged genuine k-cups.
Voids your warranty, sure, but I think you should be able to make that decision for yourself.
Farming like almost every other industry is has been under massive consolidation pressure for the last several decades, small and medium farms being bought out by large corporations.
These large corporations have no problem with these changes at JD because they do not want to repair their tractors anyway, they outsource that to the dealers now.
These changes however do drive up the costs for independent farmers which the Corporate farms love because then they can either drive them out of business or buy them cheap...
If you don't want to pay John Deere for their fancy autonomous farming, that's fine. But you should be able to swap in a different control unit and not have to worry about your tractor simply refusing to run like a Keurig machine that refuses to run non-rfid tagged genuine k-cups.
Voids your warranty, sure, but I think you should be able to make that decision for yourself.