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Comment by lawl | Hacker News Reader

> Do you feel it’s justified that you have to pay $10K extra for the self-driving feature on a Tesla? Or should they also be forced to give away that feature for free? After all, it’s just a SW upgrade.

I feel like i already paid for the hardware. If telsa says it's cheaper for them to stick the necessary hardware into every car, i'm still paying for it if i buy one without self-driving. Thus if i think the tesla software isn't worth 10k and i'd rather use openpilot, i feel like i should have the right to do that.

But nvidia is also actively interfering with open source drivers (nouveau) with signature checks etc.

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(Leaving aside that Tesla also actively prevents you from running your own software on its platform...)

The whole focus on hardware is just bizarre.

When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all of that flies out of the window.

Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it.

A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it.

Obviously, you’d prefer the first option, even if it absolutely makes no sense to do so. It’d be a waste of engineering resources that could have been spent on future products.

Deciding to disable a feature on a piece of silicon is no different than changing a #define or adding “if (option)” to disable an advanced feature.

By doing so, I have the option to not pay for an advanced feature that I don’t need.

I don’t want the self-driving option in a Tesla and I’m very happy to have that option.

I agree with you, but I also think the commenter you're replying to agrees with you.

The issue is not that Tesla FSD should come with the hardware, the issue is that if I buy the hardware I should have the right to do whatever I want with it, and so we shouldn't leave aside that Tesla prevents us from running our own software.

This is relevant to the NVidia situation since their software doesn't add features, it limits things the chip is already capable of. Just like Tesla won't let you run Comma.AI or something similar on their hardware...

>When you buy a piece of SW that has free features but requires a license key to unlock advanced features, everything is fine, but the moment HW is involved all of that flies out of the window.

This doesn't make sense at all. In your scenario you always pay for what you get. and developing additional features has a non-zero cost asociated with it (Unless you download software which targets unskilled consumers, Like Chessbase's Fritz engine which was essentially stockfish but 100$ instead of 0)

>Extra features cost money to implement. Companies want to be paid for it.

This doesn't make sense in your scenario either. You already have the sillicon with the 'advanced features' in your hands. The reason they lock the feature is so that you have to buy a more expensive card, with overpowered hardware that you dont need, in order to use a feature that all cards have if it weren't disabled. The only reasonable explanation you could have at this point that doesn't involve monopolistic practices to make more money (Nothing wrong with that) is that the development of the feature itself was so prohibitively expensive that it required consumers to pay for much higher margin cards in order to offset the development costs. Which is what's happening

>A company like Nvidia could decide to make 2 pieces of silicon, one with professional features and once without. Or they could disable it.

That would cost alot of money. all the more reasons why it might have been done to upsell more cards instead of offering quantitative improvements for a different price.

But it's not like buying a software key, is it? I want to play Windows games in a VM, not compute protein folding or whatever. I'd pay 15€ more for a 1060 to unlock advanced virtualization features, but why should I have to pay 600€ more to get a Quadro just for that one feature?

Yes, NVIDIA is actively malicious on that front.

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