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.
Maybe we should rent our video cards for $25 per month. You get 2,000,000 frames rendered per month and anything beyond that puts you in a pro gamer tier for more money.
It’ll be a collab with HP!
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.
“profiting off their work” this is the equivalent to banning wine.
Anything not from Nvidia is just “sparkling CUDA”
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.
Thanks for this rational breakdown of what’s actually happening. Pretty misleading headline tbh.
None of their business if we use a translation layer.
Agreed. I hope lawmakers step in and make EULAs like this unenforceable.
This feels illegal. Like it’s probably not, but it should be.
It probably is. In the EU APIs aren’t copyrightable in the first place, doubly so if it’s necessary for interoperability, in the US there’s Google vs. Oracle which declared Google’s use of Java APIs in Android fair use.
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.
Definitely not anticompetitive in the slightest. No need to look here, FTC.
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.
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.
Interoperability is illegal now?
Take a page from the AI companies’ book - just claim AI “learned” from the CUDA SDK and call it fair use.
Yes, the clause might be unenforceable on fair use grounds. So, if you feel like going through a couple years of risky litigation…
Funny how people aren’t cheering on NVIDIA.
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You can use graphics cards for more than just graphics, eg for AI. Nvidia is a leader in facilitating that.
They offer a software toolkit for developing programs (an SDK) that use their GPUs to best effect. People have begun making “translation layers” that allow such CUDA programs to run on non-nvidia hardware. (I have no idea how any of this works.) The license of that SDK now forbids reverse engineering its output to create these compatibility tools.
Unless I am very mistaken, Nvidia can’t ban the use of “translation layers” or stop people making them, as such. This clause creates a barrier to creating them, though.
Some programs will probably remain CUDA specific, because of that clause. That means that Nvidia is a gatekeeper for these programs and can charge extra for access.
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It’s not about it being fast, it’s about it only being available for NVidia GPUs. As long as software for things like machine learning uses CUDA, you need to buy an NVidia GPU to use it. A translation layer would let you use the same software on other companies’ GPUs, which means people aren’t forced to buy NVidia’s GPUs anymore.
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?
