Let’s take this way of thinking to the field of software, where every additional license sold has essentially zero cost.
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?
Software is not a physical good in the same way a CPU or a car is. Also, as you seem to acknowledge, when you purchase software, you are technically acquiring a license. Remove for a moment that this is controversial for some (see FSF). I think it would be a tougher sell to say when you buy a car or a piece of silicon that you don't own it. (There is firmware and microcode, sure.)
What about software that comes with a license key dongle? Now you're buying hardware as well. :-)
> 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.
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?