Thing 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. B

Thing 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.