161–170 of 179 posts
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Agreed that that may be deceptive, but the underlying issue remains. It is prohibited.
Is it? I mean, is the clause enforceable to begin with?
They will lose in court. I am reminded of IBM trying to ban 3rd party disk drive makers for from making disks that fit the IBM disk interface in the 1960s. They lost, too. However, ZLUDA may have to do a clean room reimplementation of all of CUDA, like google did with their javascript reimplementation, however ...
I'm reminded of Apple modifying their hard drives to return "Copyright (c) Apple Computers" to appropriate prodding, and refusing to mount any drive that didn't do so. That one never went to court. These days, you just do the same thing with a little rudimentary crypto.
I don’t think Nvidia can enforce this in the US let alone China.
> You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using SDK elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-NVIDIA platform. Does this actually have any legal weight besides being conveyed by a multi-trillion dollar company?
It's enough to get their lawyers after you and cost you a ton of money in legal costs to fight even if the legality behind it may be dubious. I'd say the recent Nintendo filing against Yuzu is a similar case for comparison. Is Yuzu liable for piracy because they create an emulator and create guides on how to get licensed games working on it? Who knows. Could Nintendo throw lawyers at them endlessly until they submit,…
This doesn't appear to ban using translation layers. The text is "You may not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the output generated using Software elements for the purpose of translating such output artifacts to target a non-Nvidia platform". That would appear to (attempt to -- it may not be enforceable) restrict the creation of translation layers. I don't understand how you could infer "bans…
>Dark API functions are reverse-engineered and implemented by ZLUDA on a case-by-case basis once we observe an application making use of it. https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA/blob/master/ARCHITECTURE.md
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Is it? I mean, is the clause enforceable to begin with?
Feels similar to the Microsoft vs. Sun lawsuit over Java which Sun won and eventually led to Microsoft building .NET
Google vs Oracle is about whether APIs are copyrightable and Google won.
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First sale is not a thing in my country. Resale defaults to forbidden, and when allowed by original creator, is simply subject to the same royalty and licence protections as initial sale of the copyrighted work. Clean room reverse engineering is however allowed.
Interesting, which country? edit: Never mind.
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Clean-room reverse engineering is specifically not forbidden, and has been successfully done in the past to develop the Nouveau driver. Disassembling Nvidia's binaries is plausibly forbidden, but it would be very surprising if they could extend that ban on binaries produced by their compiler. However, the trademark could be used to attack statements about the emulation layer. I see parallels to Google vs. Oracle
Note Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.
The bit about DMCA 1201 is mostly hypothetical. i.e. Nvidia's code signing looks like a DRM scheme if you squint. If Nvidia really wanted to, they could argue that, say, cracking the code signing is illegal no matter what you do with it. My gut feeling is that the courts probably wouldn't be too keen on Nvidia suing over this in the case of, say, someone writing their own power management firmware and using an exploit to load it onto a GPU. DMCA 1201 is supposed to prevent you from copying other people's work, not writing your own.
All of this is a moot point because Nvidia more recently released an "open source driver" that loads a single unified firmware blob. This has allowed building a new driver called NVK, which aside from having to load said blob is FOSS, and actually usable for Nvidia GPUs.
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It's enough to get their lawyers after you and cost you a ton of money in legal costs to fight even if the legality behind it may be dubious. I'd say the recent Nintendo filing against Yuzu is a similar case for comparison. Is Yuzu liable for piracy because they create an emulator and create guides on how to get licensed games working on it? Who knows. Could Nintendo throw lawyers at them endlessly until they submit,…
Yuzu ran a private discord that was allegedly full of piracy activity. They didn't moderate it. Writing an emulator isn't illegal, nor would gate keeping features. Allowing piracy to happen in your paid for channel might make you more complicit/responsible.