Are software companies allowed to charge a price for their free-to-produce products at all?
If they are, how would you justify that?
And why would that justification not apply to CPU vendors, if they’d label their hardware as freebies where you’re just paying for a perpetual license?
> Also, as you seem to acknowledge, when you purchase software, you are technically acquiring a license.
That's really just semantics.
When you buy a mainframe with some CPUs disabled, you're not only buying the hardware, you're also buying a license for the OS, which includes the ability to use a certain number of CPUs of the machine.
You're commenting earlier that you'd price the higher SKU the same as the lower SKU, but I think it's just as likely that you'd simply not make a higher SKU because there'd be no extra profit in doing so.
It may seem perverse that hardware is being sold with capabilities deliberately crippled, but doing so if often one of the only ways to justify developing these higher SKU capabilities to begin with. This kind of product differentiation makes it possible for customers to buy a higher SKUs that otherwise simply wouldn't exist.
This part:
> Or even better, sell everyone a soft upgradable 1 core, so you buy the entry level product, and when/if you need it, you can buy into the upmarket model
... is still one that I would have trouble with, were I the manufacturer. I would be inclined to throw away profits on high end sales and price them all low for these scenarios, based on my desire to be fair to the customer and not run the thing like a casino with physically dubious upsells for what they already purchased. Yes you read that right. This is one reason why I am not in a position to be running Intel.