7 ms·

I'm somewhat torn too. IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but y

I'm somewhat torn too. IBM and I'm sure others have shipped enterprise hardware for years that was partially locked. You might get a machine with 16 cpus but you only paid for 8, for example, but you could license the rest as you grew. It seems a little similar and it was in no way underhanded, everyone knew what the deal was. However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad.

johnl1479 3y ago
> However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]: > If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514
NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
I'm of the opinion that these two things aren't comparable. True, IBM and others have locked extra capability through software... but they were only ever selling/renting to the corporate world, which presumably had enough in-house legal expertise to not be completely dicked over. To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm. If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.
- prng2021 3y ago
  We’re not talking about enterprise software here. I think people can understand the concept of paying for a seat heater and the like without a team of lawyers.
- gibolt 3y ago
  What are you talking about... Tesla is one of only a handful of OEMs that can even issue OTA updates. Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
  - martin8412 3y ago
    Have you perhaps considered that OTAs aren't a desirable feature in a safety critical system?
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    > Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available... ... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue." ??? "We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."
huhtenberg 3y ago
> I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.
- martin8412 3y ago
  That certainly depends on the country. Breaking DRM to access something you've paid for is perfectly legal here.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    "perfectly legal" largely hasn't stopped IP owners from finding ways to hassle people involved.
  - huhtenberg 3y ago
    Yeah, I am in a country like that. I was referring to the state of affairs States-side.
- semiquaver 3y ago
  Would you mind providing a citation stating that someone has gone to jail in any country as a result of bypassing DRM for personal use on things they purchased? I am skeptical that this has ever occurred. Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable. https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec-1204/ https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec... I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
theluketaylor 3y ago
I don’t mind hardware shipping locked and being an optional fee to unlock. I have paid for the rear heated seats in my model 3. What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats? Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.
- foobiekr 3y ago
  I've always been curious if the ongoing fees for BMW end up covering repairs if the hardware covering the function breaks. It would seem absolutely insane if not, yet I am pretty sure the answer is not.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  100% agree about the ongoing features. Let me pay one time to own the software unlocks please.
- cameronh90 3y ago
  I would also add that those sorts of subscriptions shouldn't have a lock-in period, at least not more than a month. And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
- nordsieck 3y ago
  > What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades. I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car. --- 1. 20 * 12 = 240
martin8412 3y ago
AMD shipped CPUs for quite some time where if you were lucky you could unlock additional cores that had been disabled for various reasons
- adra 3y ago
  These were likely sold down due to demand imbalance or more likely due to QA failures in the disabled cores. It's a lot cheaper to get some value from a defective chip than no money. So... by all means try to unlock more cores but don't start whining when your computer acts like Windows ME on a good day (only crashing a few dozen times a day! So stable!)
- slenk 3y ago
  I tried that on my 3-core something back in the day. I was not one of the lucky ones.
y7 3y ago
I think the concept of "licensing" should not apply to something you own. If they want to rent you a CPU, fine, but then they should also bear the costs for when it breaks.
bartchamdo 3y ago
Sun Microsystems did this in the early 2000’s
kelnos 3y ago
I think the problem becomes when you figure out a way to unlock those extra CPUs without paying IBM, and then IBM sues you or terminates your contract with them entirely. People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.

johnl1479 3y ago

> However I'll echo what another poster said. I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. I think thats the stance I'm leaning towards as well. To quote another commenter[1]: > If a manufacturer wants to lock features behind a paywall, that is fine. However, they shouldn't be allowed to complain when consumers modify the thing they bought to get around that paywall. If Tesla really wants to make sure absolutely no one gets FSD or heated seats without paying, then they should make a point of only including the relevant hardware or software in the vehicle at the time of purchase. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36988514

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago

I'm of the opinion that these two things aren't comparable. True, IBM and others have locked extra capability through software... but they were only ever selling/renting to the corporate world, which presumably had enough in-house legal expertise to not be completely dicked over. To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm. If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.

prng2021 3y ago
We’re not talking about enterprise software here. I think people can understand the concept of paying for a seat heater and the like without a team of lawyers.
gibolt 3y ago
What are you talking about... Tesla is one of only a handful of OEMs that can even issue OTA updates. Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)
- martin8412 3y ago
  Have you perhaps considered that OTAs aren't a desirable feature in a safety critical system?
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  > Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available... ... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue." ??? "We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."

huhtenberg 3y ago

> I say Tesla should be free to sell whatever they want, but if the end user finds a way around it too bad. The same should go for DVDs, BluRays and streaming media and yet here we are looking at jail time for bypassing the DRM.

martin8412 3y ago
That certainly depends on the country. Breaking DRM to access something you've paid for is perfectly legal here.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  "perfectly legal" largely hasn't stopped IP owners from finding ways to hassle people involved.
- huhtenberg 3y ago
  Yeah, I am in a country like that. I was referring to the state of affairs States-side.
semiquaver 3y ago
Would you mind providing a citation stating that someone has gone to jail in any country as a result of bypassing DRM for personal use on things they purchased? I am skeptical that this has ever occurred. Even in the US, which has quite draconian anti-circumvention law under the DMCA, the criminal penalties associated with this behavior only apply to those that violate the statute “willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain”. A person who bought a DVD or blu ray and decrypted it for their own use would not be criminally liable. https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec-1204/ https://law.justia.com/codes/us/2021/title-17/chapter-12/sec... I’m not defending the law, which I disagree with, merely pointing out that “looking at jail time” for non commercial bypassing of purchased BluRay DRM is a stretch.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

theluketaylor 3y ago

I don’t mind hardware shipping locked and being an optional fee to unlock. I have paid for the rear heated seats in my model 3. What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. BMW wants to charge monthly for seat heaters or carplay, but those things are not a service and don’t have ongoing costs for BMW to provide. If anything creating an ongoing software lock creates an availability risk. If BMW’s authorization service is unavailable do you lose heated seats? Several manufacturers are offering either monthly or one time costs for certain features. I’m less clear how I feel about that. Maybe quite valuable for someone who lives somewhere warm and only needs seat heat one month a year. It would take many years of paying for a single month to justify paying for the fully unlocked feature. I think I can live with optional monthly fees for things as long as you can always pay once and just have something that stays for her life of the car.

foobiekr 3y ago
I've always been curious if the ongoing fees for BMW end up covering repairs if the hardware covering the function breaks. It would seem absolutely insane if not, yet I am pretty sure the answer is not.
asynchronous 3y ago
100% agree about the ongoing features. Let me pay one time to own the software unlocks please.
cameronh90 3y ago
I would also add that those sorts of subscriptions shouldn't have a lock-in period, at least not more than a month. And auto-renew should require explicit opt-in. For most subscriptions I have, automatic renewal is desirable, but invariably I forget to cancel trials or one month subs of things I just wanted to test.
nordsieck 3y ago
> What I’m vehemently opposed to is ongoing fees for things that don’t have ongoing costs. IMO, the real issue is the price. There is pretty broad and well established equivalency between OPex and CAPex. The problem is that car companies are trying to charge OPex as if there was a 1 year depreciation schedule, when cars typically last for decades. I think that if BMW charged 1/240th[1] the cost to buy the option in order to rent it per month, very few people would complain. Especially if that price were locked in for the life of the car. --- 1. 20 * 12 = 240

martin8412 3y ago

AMD shipped CPUs for quite some time where if you were lucky you could unlock additional cores that had been disabled for various reasons

adra 3y ago
These were likely sold down due to demand imbalance or more likely due to QA failures in the disabled cores. It's a lot cheaper to get some value from a defective chip than no money. So... by all means try to unlock more cores but don't start whining when your computer acts like Windows ME on a good day (only crashing a few dozen times a day! So stable!)
slenk 3y ago
I tried that on my 3-core something back in the day. I was not one of the lucky ones.

y7 3y ago

I think the concept of "licensing" should not apply to something you own. If they want to rent you a CPU, fine, but then they should also bear the costs for when it breaks.

bartchamdo 3y ago

Sun Microsystems did this in the early 2000’s

kelnos 3y ago

I think the problem becomes when you figure out a way to unlock those extra CPUs without paying IBM, and then IBM sues you or terminates your contract with them entirely. People should not be constrained in doing whatever they want with the hardware they have bought.