That said, I wonder what the position of the kernel community will be on including "crack" drivers that unlock these capabilities without the associated payme bullshit?
I believe there's precedent for similar "feature unlock" hardware driver code.
Now I concur that this trend of "you own something but you are going to pay a rent for it anyway" is starting to get annoying. Even more annoying as it's seems to be the "accepted" new norm. For example with the new Mercedes car where you have to pay a monthly fee to unlock some extra degree of steering angle.
BMW make people pay subscriptions for using onboard entertainment systems.
Why is Intel selling certain parts of its functionality on a lease or optional basis different?
A lease arrangement that is upfront about the terms is one thing. Intel is not leasing these CPUS, just part of them; and "complicating ownership" as i said elsewhere is what im objecting to
That's because your contempt is incoherent. Intel is selling consumers optionality. Pay a low price now when you think you don't need a feature and pay more later if you do in fact need it. Also, pay less money overall because we can design fewer chip variants and differentiate capabilities by license.
That's so... Naive? The reality is that the chips will cost the same and Intel will pocket the extra margin. And the rent.
Consumers are already used to pay X for CPU, the price tolerance is already established. What makes you think that Intel will want to cut their profit margins?
Actually its more I don't care to invest the time at the moment to attempt explaining why I object to the erosion of the very concept of "ownership" whereby we "own" things but some other entity still has legal rights over it and us in our interactions with this physical object.
Flower patents are absurd but this shit is getting nasty.
They already use efuses in a single silicon design to differentiate on product features. How does this new license scheme enable fewer designs?
This is "it's your fault for making me hit you" bully logic.
No one forced them to design multiple variants. If it's already cheaper to manufacture a full-capability chip, they could just distribute that one to all consumers and be done with it. Spending extra effort to put in a complex licensing logic that doesn't do anything else than disable features is pure greed.
Tomorrow, you buy your new shiny basic i10 proc. You then pay extra to unlock the fast multiply for our games, the fast simd for you AI and the upgrade for 4K decoding. After a while, you decide to sell on Ebay. Well your nice shiny software defined features are now worthless. Well not for Intel which has the opportunity to sell the same stuff twice or more.
What would be incoherent is for Intel to not juice this technology even more. Why not have a limited pool of licenses and let people compete for them monthly ?.
The problem is that the boundary of ownership is getting shifted, and by the look of if the consumer will loose.