It doesn’t bother me too much when the price of add-on software reflects a significant cost on their end.
If the pro version of some graphics software costs more because it includes Pantone® libraries and profiles for offset printing presses, that’s because the developer has to pay Pantone and Heidelberg and Manroland to use their IP; if most users aren’t doing professional print work they have no use for something that specialized.
Paid DLC for games is either optional cosmetic bling to show off in multiplayer, or it’s extra levels or vehicle models or something that reflect significant effort put into their creation. I can easily imagine a train simulator enthusiast only caring about, say, modern British trains; why make him pay for a giant bundle including Swiss aerial trams and 19th century Chilean funicular railways instead of offering them a la carte to people who are interested?
In this case, though, it’s fairly basic functionality. I’m pretty sure the engineering cost is already figured into the price of the hardware, since it has all the expensive bits already in it. There’s no way the software on these SD cards represents more than a few pennies of work and materials. So it’s the combination of nickel-and-diming, price gouging, DRM, and the DMCA enabling/enforcing all that that bothers me.
It’s a criminal offense for me to write a piece of software to make my fully functional welding machine do all the things it’s capable of. The only legal way for me to “mod” it would be to pay some bastard $200 for the privilege of using the machine I own to do things it’s fully capable of already.
That’s morally outrageous.
How’d you like it if Windows suddenly started refusing to open, say, Firefox until you pay Microsoft for a license to operate Firefox in windows. And what if they decided that uninstalling Windows from your machine then installing Linux was circumvention as well? Then we’d be right where we are with these welders.
It’s the TPM signing issue with UEFI secureboot all over again. If motherboard manufacturers decided to switch on secureboot and not offer a way to deactivate it, figuring out how to deactivate secureboot on your own would itself be a crime. And that’s some bullshit right there.
Half a dozen (or four) national/international companies constitutes choice and a healthy market?
People who know only history from the Channel, innovation from a brochure with an Apple on it, and economics from Bloomberg… I don’t blame you, exactly. I just wish people studied things more before putting so much effort into delivering received “wisdom”.
Thought. Inverter-based welders are nothing but a SMPS with voltage and current feedback. Pretty much all of them share the switching PSU topology on the input; two or four FETs or IGBTs in a half or full bridge.
There could be a universal retrofit board that could add advanced capabilities to any kind of a welder that has the bare hardware capabilities (or can be modded to have them, there is only a finite amount of circuits on the secondary side; todo, take apart my welder and see if I could add a high voltage or high frequency injection for no-hassle arc striking).
Essentially, a “Weldduino shield” that would have inputs from the voltage/current sensors, outputs for the FET/IGBT gates, and a few generic configurations for the most common types.
Any kind of a dumb or crippled welder then could be upgraded with a minimal hassle into a fully functioning brainy unit with all the settings you can ask for and then some, and source code available if you need a feature nobody thought about yet.
Think about e.g. the Merlin 3d printing controller firmware and its support for different peripherals and different stepper driver boards. Extend the principle to welding and high-power power supplies in general (an electric car battery charger is pretty similar, too - a current/voltage limited power supply). One board and one firmware for most of your high power PSU needs.
It’s illegal only if you get caught.
Hack the planet. Or die trying.
Edit: Are there some schematics, original or reverse-engineered, of such welders? Could be interesting to do an across-the-board comparison to see the common points. Stepper motors typically have two signals, direction and step; switching power supply primaries have the switch gates… what such simple “demarcation lines” are there in welders and other similar equipment? The borders where we can cut out the original controls and put in replacements? Such generic or at least semigeneric retrofit “brains” based on Arduino and Raspi class boards could be pretty handy everywhere from cars to workshops to kitchens.
Well, I’ve been hoping someone made a generic open welding power source that I could program myself without significant risks, but using generic Asian import welders (many have very similar designs) and tacking on new controls might also work.
It’s a welder…how diverse can you really make it at a certain price point? I care far more about quality than quantity, and if I was a professional or business I’d certainly be looking into a welder from one of the top tier companies (if for nothing more than the support). But as a casual home user the cheaper imports would probably last me just as long and work just as well yet cost me much less. So why does it matter if there are twenty companies that make hammers if I only need a quality one? It’s a “thing”, make it well and sell it for a price the market bears.
You mean like Android locking out SD card capabilities with an update? New versions of Apple hardware locking out previous abilities of an older model? Locked boot loaders are plentiful in the smartphone world, yet the masses aren’t clamoring for that as a “feature”.
A lot of the way things work, the way companies make them work, is outrageous to me. Yet there is a choice here, and a choice with smartphones, and a choice in just about every case out there. As far as the legality of hacking this, yes it stupid, but is $200 worth the time it would take to hack this? I suppose if you then could sell that code for $20 a pop it would be, but isn’t that the driving idea behind making it illegal in the first place? Because you certainly could hack your own welder and I seriously doubt Miller would care.
Dude, nice strawman to accuse me a non sequitur. I never said or even implied “under any circumstances”. If anything, I implied the opposite.
We agree there. I can see why companies would be pissed, but I don’t think crazy fines and jail time are the right answer though. I wasn’t replying to the post, I was replying to posters who can’t understand why a company might have a legit reason to charge two prices for the same hardware.
No but other than “they,” “money” was the only noun you quoted from my post, so I think I was on pretty firm ground to assume you were referring to money.
It’s legitmately interesting to me that you (and many others) feel this way. I totally understand the visceral reaction that the hardware is the hardware, so it’s not costing the company anything if you circumvent the control. But I think my hypothetical shows a situation where it’s fair that a company charge for it. To be clear, I don’t support the criminal/civil lawsuits with huge fines and jailtime. I’m talking about the “morality” of it. Given my hypothetical, if a company is spending more to offer me the option to upgrade and I circumvent the control to get the upgrade for free, I’m the one being immoral.
I understand your position regarding perceived morality of pricing for different products. And I understand that you would like the discussion to compartmentalize pricing morality from legal morality. The world would be a better place if more people did.
But since anti circumvention laws were passed it is exceedingly clear that there is no clear bright line between the two (hello Lexmark!!). Unfortunately the Pandora’s box of moral pricing has been opened, and it contained legal structures to prevent owners from owning what they bought.
That’s the basic idea. Treat “finished” things as components, buy them for what they intrinsically are, retrofit them with cheap control boards to gain capabilities of order(s) of magnitude more expensive toys. Buy a cheap dumb body and transplant a brain.
Would you enjoy the time spent? If so, its cost does not count as cost. Sometimes the work is its own reward. For example, people spend lots of money to climb stupid mountains with nothing interesting on top.
You can feel “moral”, or you can have a cheaper welder upgrade and spend the money on the metal stock and shield gas instead. I’d say the choice looks clear.
If we want to go into the quagmire of philosophy, I’d say that “moral” would be to supply the welder with complete schematics and source codes of the firmware. Closed-source hinders progress and makes everything more costly when what we need is lowering the barriers to entry to the bare minimum.
We’ve successfully entered internet comment purgatory haven’t we? Dang.
I won’t try to convince you that I’m right or prove you wrong, instead I’ll limit myself to stating my point. As straight as I can put it, I’d have no problem with this if DRM wasn’t involved.
Modifying the device itself is not illegal, if it were immoral, as you feel it is, it would still not be illegal. (It would invalidate warranty though, and rightly so.)
DRM is being used as a way to stop the owner of the device from doing things that are legal.
Elasticities, quality, pricing, and abusive marketing practices would be much improved with 50+. With exclusive IP rights and no mandatory licensing, no contemporary tech product market can get there, which gives you the idea that it can’t happen. Oh, the arrogance of someone who’s never seen a wholesale catalog of any kind from 50 years ago.
