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.