Well, it isn't okay for NVIDIA to try and charge me tens of thousands for a quadro card instead of just letting me virtualize my Geforce 1080.

In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through.

It's also not okay for Apple to restrict what hardware I can run their software with. I have run hackintoshes and OS X VMs.

I voice my support and concern for these vendors' policies appropriately by using my wallet. The policies you listed are not okay.

That is not voting with your wallet.

Voting with your wallet would be not using anything from NVidia and Apple to start with, including the business opportunities it might entail.

> Voting with your wallet would be not using anything

That's RMS thinking. If you don't mind, I'll expand on it. Voting with your wallet includes not paying into third party workarounds because their existence depends on the bad actors to exist (in some cases).

I have read literature from Stallman essentially supporting piracy of closed-source, proprietary products without saying it directly. This is more impactful in the software realm where you are not still giving hardware sales, but that is his stance.

However, I think NVIDIA is still leading the industry (AMD is catching up fast, but still lags behind) and I want to support their hardware development. However, I make it clear what kind of relationship I expect from them by virtualizing my Geforce instead of buying a Quadro. I also support open-source driver initiatives and abhor NVIDIA's practice of not releasing hardware schematics if they aren't going to open source the driver. It's a complicated issue.

> In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through.

In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and buy Radeon. Vote with your wallet.

As I mentioned in a sister comment, it's far more nuanced than that. NVIDIA makes the better card for the money, so they get my hardware sales. That's where it ends, however, as I do not partake in their ridiculous licensing scheme. If and when AMD finally catches up, I have no problem making the switch. That is voting with my wallet.

Well, there's "okay" in the legal/contractual sense and there's "okay" in the customer-friendly, long term interests of the company. This move may be the former, but not the later, and MS seems to be banking on gaining more revenue for these licenses & switches to Azure than they lose when some customers decide to stick with AWS but move away from Windows. Either way, some group of customers, however small, will choose to move away from Windows, so their long term market share will be smaller. Is this "okay"? Depends on which way MS has placed its bets.

One thing this article gets right is that this seems to be a move back towards the good old "Where do we want you to go today?" Microsoft of yore.

My read on this is that this is really "price simplification". If you want to run Windows on the big public clouds, you used to have three options:

(1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate

(2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware"

(3) pay for software assurance

Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.

applying price differentiation on a product that you already sold to double dip is pretty scummy

Perhaps, but that's not happening here. The Windows license change doesn't retroactively apply to existing licenses.

It does apply to existing customers as soon as they need to scale out. Well, unless they decide to pay down their tech debt and get out ASAP.

Maybe they shouldn't have used an on- premise lisence in the cloud in the first place

Yeah, how dare they try to use the exact model they've been using for years, scaled onto rented hardware!

Maybe they should have used Wine in the first place.

> Why is it okay for . . . .

It's not okay.

Yeah, pointing to annoying, anti-competitive, customer-unfriendly practices the happen to exist doesn't make them "okay". It only means companies aren't prohibited by law/contract from doing them. Only in that sense are they "okay"

Why is it not ok to disable some features on a device and sell it cheaper?

How is this anti-competitive? How is this customer-unfriendly?

Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything. There used to be this belief that things are worth as much as the cost to produce them + some margin for the maker. And things were made so they will benefit their consumers. Unfortunately more and more companies these days look for ways to get not what something is worth but to get from consumers as much as possible, to squeeze them like lemons.

It's a business decision which will make them more money.

In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money.

In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product.

I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.

Exactly right. It is acceptable to argue that the pricing is too high and unfair. But to say the structure itself is wrong isn't correct.

Breaking up the total price of a product by it's component features and then creating variants of the sold product with certain features enabled vs disabled and hence having different total prices is one fair way of create products that are tailored to customers needs.

When pricing individual features, the prices may not correlate relative to each other. There may be factors like which features are most used by which segment of customers and how valuable the feature is to that segment customer and hence how much they are willing to pay.

Demanding that all the features should be sold at the lowest total cost doesn't make sense. We don't do this in any other domain.

"Moral" is a loaded word to throw in here. I wouldn't use that term. Customer-unfriendly etc. I think fit better. And if we're positing hypothetical universes, let's a Universe C: They give customers the faster version that doesn't cost them any more, and as a result they build more brand loyalty and good will, leading to more sales, market share, etc.

But profits are somewhat besides the point: I'm saying simply that some policies are not customer friendly. Whether or not you consider that to be good or bad may very well depend on whether you are a customer or a shareholder.

If the less powerful costs the same to make and is just crippled full version, then for me it’s not ethical and calling it a choice is a farce.

Btw obviously I’m not talking about software. Im not talking about pricing things with no marginal cost.

> Because giving something more to the customer would not cost them anything.

Even if that were true, so what? Some customers are willing to trade less features for less money. It doesn't matter that other features are present but disabled. Those customers got exactly what they paid for. They're not getting cheaped out on.

One thing is trading features for money, the other is artificially crippling the product just so you can release a cheaper version. For what, to justify unreasonably high price for complete version?

The second part sounds kinda like “They don’t know they got screwed, so it’s completely fine”.

They didn't get screwed. They paid for X features. That's not getting screwed. The fact that +Y features are turned off is of absolutely zero consequence.

This is like the trolley problem of software licensing:

Scenario 1: Product has 3 features at x Price. New license is created with 4 features at price x+y

Scenario 2: Product has 3 features at x+y Price. Slimmed down license is created for a product 3 features at x price.

People applaud the former order, and cringe at the latter, but (at least in this artificial description, after the second option is available, the scenarios are equivalent. But something about loss aversion seems to trigger a moral sentiment.

The marginal cost is next to zero, but the cost is certainly not.

As to what something is worth, surely the cost of production is not the sole factor.

Cost of production is a big factor. Economic theory generally holds that in a competitive environment over a decent period of time, prices will fall to just about the marginal cost of production. Think of the commodification of the PC in the late 90's/early 00's. Highly competitive environment drove prices to just a hair over costs. However, at least one company, Apple, held a very customer-friendly stance (not to mention good marketing) and was able to charge a decent amount above that as a result. (In some ways the good marketing was spreading the message of their customer-friendly stance)

If you are pricing it at cost plus, yeah, it can be worth near-ish the cost of production. Not things with assosciated costs like rnd, but think some of spare parts, for example.

Key error in your argument: "would not cost them anything."

Of course they would lose profit on the customers that would pay for X instead of .8X. "if i can buy the same hardware at 20% less cost why would I buy it at the full cost?"

This is not an error in my argument. You just do not understand what I mean by “customer-friendly(ethical)”.

It's perfectly ok. There is no harm here. We do not need morality police for a voluntary business deal where you have complete freedom and choice to purchase a product.

Just to clarify, Apple does allow you to run macOS inside VMs provided they are running on Apple hardware.

But yes, the EULA restricts running macOS on non-Apple hardware.

Regarding Nvidia, is this just a straight disable of full-function chips? Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.

In my case, NVIDIA released a "bug" in the driver years ago which disabled the ability of Geforce cards to run in virtualized environments.

They have not addressed or fixed this "bug", and instead point consumers to their ridiculously expensive Quadro cards, which are prohibitively expensive not to mention overkill for most consumers.

This "bug" can be fixed in some hypervisors, for example in KVM, by spoofing certain system information.

> ... is this just a straight disable of full-function chips?

> Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.

If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?

Right, take the Intel i486 chips. Intel sold 486SX, and 486DX chips, plus a 487DX. Now, as far as an end user was concerned, the 486DX was a CPU as you'd think of it today with integrated FPU (relatively novel at the time in desktop) the 486SX was missing an FPU (still fine to run workloads that were at the time predominantly integer only) and the 487DX was an upgrade to make your 486SX have an FPU

But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.

So??

A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for.

Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay?

If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.

I don't think anybody's claiming it's illegal. Just questioning whether it's a smart move on Microsoft's part.

If one wishes to price like that, they do it from the start. We have more than enough history to show that you don't offer customers something for one price scheme and then change it in the middle to get even more money out of them. It doesn't work and only causes problems.

This applies to new licenses purchased starting in October. It's not "in the middle."

This is just whataboutism. Other companies doing bad things doesn't make Microsoft's bad things any less bad.