Nowadays you cant do anything with the software or hardware you put and have on your pc.
If nvidia is going to go on a power trip, then please make that nvidia drivers is only allowed to get installed by nvidia servicemen before that the servicemen teaches the user about their 30 thousand page eula what and what they can do with THEIR bought hardware.
and what they
canare allowed by Nvidia to do with THEIR bought hardware.I read the article, and a few points stuck out to me:
- This has been a restriction since 2021; now it’s documented in the files and not just the online EULA (ie consistent)
- This is a protection to disallow other companies like Intel and AMD from profiting off of Nvidia’s work
- Nothing is stopping anybody from porting the software to other hardware, eg
Recompiling existing CUDA programs remains perfectly legal. To simplify this, both AMD and Intel have tools to port CUDA programs to their ROCm (1) and OpenAPI platforms, respectively.
I’m all for piracy and personal freedoms, but it doesn’t seem to be what this is about. It’s about combating other companies profiting off Nvidia’s work. Companies should be able to fight back against other companies (or countries).
I mean it’s not like Nvidia is unreasonably suing open-source projects into oblivion or anything, or subpoenaing websites for user data; at least, not yet.
Their motive is likely more profit but the result is an unjust restriction on user software freedom. It doesn’t matter if they make less money, maximising profit is not why we grant them copyright. Nvidia is often unreasonable, fuck off Nvidia.
maximising profit is not why we grant them copyright
That’s the only reason copyright exists. Because society decided that if you’re the one to put work into developing something, you should be the one reaping the profits, at least for some time.
No, that’s a lie. Copyright exists solely for the purpose “to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” – i.e., to enrich the Public Domain in the long run. Enabling creators to profit is nothing more than a means to that end.
You could argue corporate lobbying has molded copyright for profit’s sake (e.g. we can thank Disney for copyright lasting an unreasonably long time) but that’s not all copyright does. Copyleft is a hack of copyright that lets people use software/media created by another but legally compels you to share it under the same license - meaning a greedy corporation can’t just take your work and not share back.
There’s a good argument that Nvidia only had the money to do the work because of anticompetitive practices, and so shouldn’t be allowed to benefit from it unless everyone’s allowed to benefit from it, otherwise it’s just cementing their dominant position further.
None of their business if we use a translation layer.
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That’s the neat thing about being in the American oligarchs class. If it’s illegal just make it legal.
Feels like a fantastic base for an anti-trust case at the least.
I guess this is Nvidia’s reaction to projects like ZLUDA.
And that’s a textbook case why monopolies are bad for pretty much everyone except the shareholders of that monopolistic company.
An anti-trust lawsuit is overdue
Nvidia is dominating the AI chip market. If our laws were properly enforced, Nvidia should’ve been too afraid to abuse their market position like this.
Is something like this actually enforceable? That’s like Microsoft saying you can’t use Wine on Linux.
Wine is done on clean room reverse engineering, it doesn’t use any propetriary code as reference. If they had done so, Microsoft would have grounds to sue them.
This can’t enforce anything on CUDA versions below 11.6; but any functionality introduced to CUDA after 11.6 needs to be clean room reverse engineered, so this will make ZLUDA development on those versions more difficult.
Yeah, Wine is very strict about this; IIRC if you’ve ever even looked at the leaked Windows XP source code, you’re not allowed to work on Wine.
It might not be. But the mere potential of having to litigate for years will have a chilling effect.
Interoperability is illegal now?
How does this make sense? If you’ve got an NVIDIA card, you don’t need an emulation level. And if you have a different hardware that needs an emulation layer, you don’t have to agree to those NVIDIA terms, because you are not using their products.
The EULA is associated with the CUDA software, not the NVIDIA hardware.
Ah, OK. TIL. Thanks.
The “cuda cores” you are probably thinking of are hardware implementations of the cuda software
Cuda is the main reason Nvidia has their monopoly. Especially their artifiical limitations on VRAM for more expensive cards would make AMD a lot more interesting if AMD actually had good support.
Is this not similar to the Android Java interface?
