alt Hacker News>It’s just disabled on the cars sold without the option.
So exactly like software licensing? Most apps nowadays don't even require a purchase to download. The download is free but you need to pay $4.99/month subscription to use, or $99.99 for a "lifetime subscription". The code's are all there. The author just doesn't want you to use it.
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That’s not exactly the same. You don’t get to have a car for free with basic driving functionality and then pay for additional features once you realize the car is useful and the people do made it deserve to be paid for their work, which they were willing to meet you have for free in its basic form.
This is something far more heinous, you bought a thing for a lot of money and just in order to extort even more money from you, they simply disable/lock away a feature that you technically already possess.
A better analogy in software might be that you bought a video game for $60,000 and the only way to beat a lower level boss without spending 2,000 hours trying to, is to pay the developers another $5,000 for a super weapon.
this reminds me of the old IBM tabulation machines that were sold in 2 different models at different prices, the cheaper one just had a metal tab inserted to limit the processing speed - you could remove the tab to unlock full speed
As it should be.
You'd prefer they get nothing for the effort they put into developing the software?
Ahh, DRM-ed cars. I should have seen that one coming, really.