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Yes, particularly aggressive companies have had their EULAs upheld in court (in the US). Circumventing the EULA prompt is considered agreement to the EULA term
by Teknoman117 5y ago
Yes, particularly aggressive companies have had their EULAs upheld in court (in the US).
Circumventing the EULA prompt is considered agreement to the EULA terms in the US. If you fight that too much in court, it would then be considered software piracy.
The way things tend to be enforced is that while you own the physical piece of hardware, you do not own or necessarily have any rights to the software on it, or for it.
- grishka 5y agoThing is, you could usually reverse engineer a piece of hardware enough to write your own software for it, as described in the OP article. That's fully legal. But NVidia designed their hardware on purpose such that you're required to use their proprietary blob to initialize it and you can't substitute it with something open-source. So hardware is effectively useless unless you send it this particular Highly Proprietary™ sequence of bytes that NVidia won't let you have without way too many strings attached. I guess one way would be to write a driver that does this exact thing this thread suggests, and release it under a license that forbids its distribution into and within the US. And of course never ever host any parts of it on any infrastructure located in the US or owned by a US company.
- Teknoman117 5y agoI mean, good luck. The internal CPU core you have to initialize will only execute signed code for the most part, so any open source high performance driver for the card would have to get a hold their root keys. And doing that is covered by quite a few international laws, so whoever did it would be pretty screwed.