> Are you against buying a license to unlock advanced software features as well
I'm against "licenses" in general. If your software is running on my computer, I make the rules. If it's running on your server, you make the rules. It's very simple.
> do you have the same irrational belief that only products that include a HW component shouldn’t be allowed to charge for advanced features?
When I buy a thing, I expect it to perform to its full capacity. Nothing irrational about that.
> Would you prefer if companies made 2 separate pieces of silicon designs, one with virtualization support in HW and one without
Sure. At least then there would be real limitation rather than some made up illusion.
> even if it would reduce their ability to work on advancing the state of the art due to wasted engineering resources?
The real waste of engineering resources is all this software limiter crap. They shouldn't even be writing drivers in the first place. They're a hardware company, they should be making hardware and publishing documentation. Instead they're locking out open source developers, adding DRM to their cards and blocking workloads they don't like.
> Or would you prefer that all features are enabled all the time, but with the consequence that prices are raised by, say, 10% for everyone, even though 99% of customers don’t give a damn about these extra features?
Not really? I don't really care how much money they burn on useless stuff. You brought up misuse of engineering resources so I pointed out the fact they didn't actually have to write any software. All they have to do is release documentation and the problem will take care of itself.
I'm against "licenses" in general. If your software is running on my computer, I make the rules. If it's running on your server, you make the rules. It's very simple.
> do you have the same irrational belief that only products that include a HW component shouldn’t be allowed to charge for advanced features?
When I buy a thing, I expect it to perform to its full capacity. Nothing irrational about that.
> Would you prefer if companies made 2 separate pieces of silicon designs, one with virtualization support in HW and one without
Sure. At least then there would be real limitation rather than some made up illusion.
> even if it would reduce their ability to work on advancing the state of the art due to wasted engineering resources?
The real waste of engineering resources is all this software limiter crap. They shouldn't even be writing drivers in the first place. They're a hardware company, they should be making hardware and publishing documentation. Instead they're locking out open source developers, adding DRM to their cards and blocking workloads they don't like.
> Or would you prefer that all features are enabled all the time, but with the consequence that prices are raised by, say, 10% for everyone, even though 99% of customers don’t give a damn about these extra features?
That is how things are supposed to work, yes.