What about the case of hacking the hardware to increase the bandwidth limit? Not a single byte of the firmware is changed.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/reasons-for-hacking-dsos/msg899219/#msg899219
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen anyone answer that question, ie what is the difference between lifting a resistor and fiddling the code.
I don't see any difference, morally, ethically or legally. If the manufacturer is also selling and supporting an equivalent to the modified device, then in neither case is there a valid entitlement to the modification.
What is your view if you were to discover that your scope operates beyond its specified bandwidth without you doing any modification?
For example, you discovered it's twice its specified bandwidth in certain (non-contrived or fiddled) scenarios?
Would it be morally, ethically or legally wrong to use the scope in a way that benefitted from this additional bandwidth that you didn't pay for?
The specific case I am referring to is that I have a 600MHz scope that runs at 840MHz bandwidth in real time, and when running in equivalent time has a bandwidth of over 1.2GHz.
No problem, of course. The manufacturer exceed their specification; good for them. HP used to do that kind of thing all the time with their instruments.
As an engineer I would, of course, be a fool to order such a scope in the expectation that the particular one delivered to me would exceed the specification. Ditto ordering 1% resistors in the expectation that they would be 0.1%, because I once had a 1% resistor that was only 0.1% away from its nominal value.
Here's a more interesting and less contrived example of this...
In the late 70s when digital was being introduced between exchanges and before optical fibres were widespread, the PCM was carried by existing paper insulated quad pairs. These were specified and guaranteed at 1.6kHz, but they were being used for 2Mb/s PCM - or at least the subset of pairs in a cable that were sufficiently good were being pressed into service.
The GPO, because it was before BT, would have liked to agree
test specifications with the cable manufacturer for 2Mb/s operation, which wouldn't have changed the cable's manufacture. But the GPO didn't dare do that because it would have given the cable manufatrures the opportunity to hike prices. Instead the GPO developed a test set to measure which pairs would work in any give cable.
The cable company delivered cables tested at 1.6kHz, and the client used bits at 2Mb/s. Everybody knew what was happening, none had any grounds for complaint.