I'm looking at it more from the thought process of you paid for the whole damn thing but you only get what we say you get. What happens if your system fails &you need to start over? Do they keep a record of past purchase? What if you switch from windoze to Linux? Sorry bub, you need to buy the penguin package to unlock the Linux features. The whole thing just smells like shit, I don't care what kind of bread they try to serve it to you on.
Never buy an enterprise switch, you would be furious.
Yes it has 64 physical ports but we only licensed 12.
Good points about how in practice it won't work as smoothly as in theory.
As for justifying the idea itself, it comes down to who pays for development of features. By segmenting, they can have the people that need and can justify the cost of those additional features, pay for them. If they enabled them in every chip, people who don't need them would pay more.
In the abstract, isn't software itself a version of this? "You paid for all that nice hardware that can hold any program in memory, but now you've got to pay us for that program to make use of your hardware."
They are two different things. One is useless without the other. And you don't necessarily have to buy software when a free alternative like Linux exists. I understand that hardware companies need to make money, but what basically amounts to a subscription service to use it is not the way forward.
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