All right, on this podcast episode of TREX Talk, I want to talk about resiliency. I want to talk about

CNC machine software and right to repair. Now, we've talked about right to repair a little bit

in past episodes, but I really want to specifically talk about the company Tormock. Tormock is a company

that makes CNC routers and C&C milling

machines, and they made an announcement a couple weeks ago saying that they were a right to repair

company. Now, right to repair means a lot of different things to different people, and essentially

what it really boils down to, in my opinion, is actually more of an ownership issue than directly a repair issue.

So if you can't actually repair or maintain or adjust or use the product on your own terms,

do you actually own it?

And generally speaking, this conversation revolves around consumer electronics and, to lesser extent, software.

Because you don't expect to be able to get into your software and actually change the

source code and manipulate that software and alter it and make code-level bug fixing repairs

to the software, you wouldn't think of software as being related to this right-to-repair issue,

but it is directly related to this

ownership issue, more and more pieces of software that exist today. They don't exist as products

anymore. They exist as services that you subscribe to. So you subscribe to Adobe Photoshop. You don't

own Adobe Photoshop. You subscribe to Autodesk Fusion 360. You don't actually own it. You use it at

Autodesk's discretion as long as they allow you to and you continue to pay for it. And there are

certain physical tools that fall into this category as well. They exist as a sort of a lease

option. You're essentially subscribing to the service of this,

then there's other things like printers where technically you own the printer, but you

are unable to use it without buying the ink from the specific supplier that makes the ink for

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