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Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

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11–20 of 155 posts

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#12
If true then Nvidia has gone nuts. There is no way that they can control what end users of their products do with their products and/or their software post download to the extent where they are going to have a say in what locality you can use their software and where not.

Utterly ridiculous. For a company that has seen my solid support so far I'm extremely disappointed.

Could someone fluent in Japanese please confirm the claim in the title?

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#13
post #6
post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

What if you write your own block chain where the POW is "do a deep learning task"?

This is the concept behind openmined.org - the “miners” are rewarded for improving the gradient (the data is anonymised).

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#14
post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

I'm not a legal expert and don't understand EULAs at all. I expected a "Datacenter" to be defined at some point but I didn't see a definition in the EULA.

How should one interpret this? Is a research cluster a datacenter? How about a rack of a few dozen machines I built by hand? I've been in university research groups that had both options.

Somewhat maddening to have a single line in the EULA that's so open to interpretation.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#15

If true then Nvidia has gone nuts. There is no way that they can control what end users of their products do with their products and/or their software post download to the extent where they are going to have a say in what locality you can use their software and where not. Utterly ridiculous. For a company that has seen my solid support so far I'm extremely disappointed. Could someone fluent in Japanese please confirm…

It's true, here is the updated license: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen....

Text:

  No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment,
  except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#16
post #6
post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

What if you write your own block chain where the POW is "do a deep learning task"?

courts aren't (yet?) ruled by machines; you'll have a hard time arguing this to an actual human being

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#17

If true then Nvidia has gone nuts. There is no way that they can control what end users of their products do with their products and/or their software post download to the extent where they are going to have a say in what locality you can use their software and where not. Utterly ridiculous. For a company that has seen my solid support so far I'm extremely disappointed. Could someone fluent in Japanese please confirm…

It's true, here is the updated license: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen... . Text: No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

So, once again proof that open source is the only way to go.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#18

I thought the NVIDIA drivers for the more fancy cards (TITAN etc) are the same as for the gforce cards. Wouldn't this restriction apply to those cards as well? Doesn't make much sense to me...

That is probably the point.

They want to sell two fungible products while enforcing a pricing hurdle so that certain types of customers have to pay much more for the same performance.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#19
post #3

This is the relevant change in the EULA you need to accept when downloading (installing?) the GeForce driver. The article is weirdly translated, this is apparently a global NVIDIA thing and not specific to "NVIDIA Japan". > No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted. Edit: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload…

I'm not a legal expert and don't understand EULAs at all. I expected a "Datacenter" to be defined at some point but I didn't see a definition in the EULA. How should one interpret this? Is a research cluster a datacenter? How about a rack of a few dozen machines I built by hand? I've been in university research groups that had both options. Somewhat maddening to have a single line in the EULA that's so open to interp…

Undefined terms like that speak to the weakness of the EULA as an enforceable contract.

Re: Nvidia’s New Policy Limits GeForce Data Center Usage

#20
Curious coincidence... I was thinking of something similar earlier today.

What is physical object had EULA licenses like, software ?

Something more-or-less serious, like "you are not allowed to use this knife to eat meat", or "you are not allowed to use this spoon to eat jelly" or even "it is forbidden to publish a benchmark of this car" (related to an article that passed here on hn like a week ago).

Would such EULA licenses be enforceable ? And so, assuming companies would be allowed to enforce clearly ridiculous terms, what does this tell us about software licenses ?

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