[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'm of the opinion that these two things aren't comparable. True, IBM and others have locked extra capability through software... but they were only ever selling/renting to the corporate world, which presumably had enough in-house legal expertise to not be completely dicked over.

To take that business practice, and then try to foist it on consumers who don't have $500/hour lawyers on retainer looking out for them is more than just morally questionable, it crosses a line into some sort of fraud/extortion-adjacent realm.

If Tesla was really upset about this, it's a problem completely within their capacity to solve. Only send bugfixes OTA, require a service visit for new features. I'm betting that their software's such a trainwreck they wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it properly like that to save their own lives.

[prng2021]

We’re not talking about enterprise software here. I think people can understand the concept of paying for a seat heater and the like without a team of lawyers.

[gibolt]

What are you talking about... Tesla is one of only a handful of OEMs that can even issue OTA updates.

Their cars from 2013 can still get modern features OTA. Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors (none of whom specialize in software)

[FireBeyond]

> Please explain how you classify that as a train wreck compared to software cobbled together from 100 vendors

Tesla gets plenty of software from other vendors. And doesn't always test it particularly well - there was a story here of a firmware vendor who had a test harness that took ~36h to verify. They shipped a bug fix to Tesla, told them it was available...

... four hours later, "Great, this is awesome, looks like we fixed the issue."

???

"We just flashed one of the cars here and took it for a drive."

[martin8412]

Have you perhaps considered that OTAs aren't a desirable feature in a safety critical system?