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I think they're trying to do the trick where they don't ban the emulation per se, but they make it a violation of the license to disassemble the code to underst

I think they're trying to do the trick where they don't ban the emulation per se, but they make it a violation of the license to disassemble the code to understand how it works. Then they go after emulating projects for copyright infringement, since they must have violated copyright to get a compatible version running. It's a dirty trick IMO, but it has seen some mixed success.

lunfard000 3y ago
I dont think China cares too much about what NVIDIA thinks considering the ban in place.
ActionHank 3y ago
So they just put up their hand and said they also want to give the EU money?
- brookst 3y ago
  At this point with the level of demand they have, it might be easier and cheaper to just not do business in the EU.
  - jijijijij 3y ago
    Funny how nobody does that, eh?! Could be because the EU is the second biggest consumer market on this planet. But of course, they could totally focus on China, now third and rising, instead. Maybe they can even ask the CCP to help them with their IP claims and stuff.
    - brookst 3y ago
      Or it could be because the EU has not yet reached the tipping point where it’s not worth it, or it could be that they have but companies are adapting by reducing investment and it will take years for patterns to emerge. Not sure where the weird China stuff came from. Are you saying that as long as the EU is even slightly better than China we should celebrate it?
      - jijijijij 3y ago
        > Are you saying that as long as the EU is even slightly better than China we should celebrate it? No. I am saying, as long as the American market isn't enough for the growth necessities these giga corporations set themselves up to, they pretty much have no choice, but to go with the European market - since it's the second largest consumer market. And since the argument is about Nvidia being silly about IP stuff, the Chinese market - the third largest and therefore next best alternative to the European market - isn't exactly known to give a fuck about IP, at all, so good luck with that. Also: > EU has not yet reached... > EU is even slightly better than China... Jesus Christ. Throw your unread Atlas Shrugged copy into the cringe bin, and fucking touch some grass, for real.
samus 3y ago
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
- salawat 3y ago
  Note Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.
  - samus 3y ago
    Recently, development has picked up again though. They basically surrendered and now use the proprietary blob. The Mesa driver supports Vulkan 1.3 and Zink will be used for OpenGL going forward. Now on to more performance optimization and maybe bringing up some of the other proprietary IP blocks...
    - salawat 3y ago
      Realistically, all that means is that Nouveau is giving in to the death of rights of First Sale, which is a fight I'm not willing to give up on fighting for yet even if every deep pocketed interest and it's sister seems to be swinging that way.
      - samus 3y ago
        I don't completely get your point I fear. Using the blob is simply accepting the fact that the cards are hamstrung without it. They won that round. Let's hope that AMD and Intel eventually get it together and come up with products that can slowly erode Nvidia's moat.
      - anticensor 3y ago
        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.
colechristensen 3y ago
The alternative is NVIDIA charging for what they're spending money on and making CUDA as big a cost as the hardware. I don't know what I agree with but hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. I wonder legally if it would work to instead have licensing that charged a reasonable fee to run CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware. Just don't enforce it for developers, but have it big enough and enforced enough so corporations would hesitate or pay... or just make it large enough to make it not make sense to run on non-NVIDIA cards.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. ... bad thing for whom? Especially having been in the unenviable position of needing to debug implementation errors in shader compilation, I'd argue that for the end user, it's much better if the software is not only usable for free, but open-source. To the extent that the ownership the hardware vendors place upon their software prevents this, I'd say that's a bad thing. If NVIDIA can't compete on hardware they're just bailing water from a sinking ship. All their competition has to do is provide and adopt a just-as-good open software standard on cheaper hardware and people will flock to it, NVIDIA will be forced to provide compatibility or become an also-ran, and they'll lose anyway.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    "All their competition has to do" is quite the assumption, when in fact CUDA and drivers is a very significant portion of the work NVIDIA does. NVIDIA is winning because of their software work, this is where they've added the most value to their product. NVIDIA can compete on hardware, but the reason AI/ML is where it is today rests largely on the investment in software NVIDIA has done in the last 20 years enabling these kinds of things. Everyone could be using the open source alternatives, but they're not because the OSS isn't as good because... nobody paid for it. I'm all for open source, you should be able to run whatever you want on your NVIDIA card (and you can, no walled gardens there), but it doesn't go as far as insisting that if someone wrote software it should be free.
j1elo 3y ago
I wonder how it's not a trivial workaround to have a separate, anonymous project with the sole scope of disassembling the code (and thus violating the license), while acting as knowledge source for emulators. This way, emulators wouldn't be violating any license, just using technical details learned from third party sources. The anonymous project itself would be attacked by Nvidia, and in case this succeeded, replicas of the repo would probably pop up quickly and easily. But good luck having a chinese Gitee repo closed for american copyright infringement!
- mech422 3y ago
  It appears from the comments here that just disassembling the nvidia code would NOT be a violation? it seems that only disassembling to use in a compatibility layer would be ? I believe, this 2 stage/project system was how DeCSS for DVDs worked? Someone cracked it and posted the code, which could them be picked up/used by others as it was 'public knowledge' or some such ??
  - AstralStorm 3y ago
    It is already prohibited on copyright grounds. They put the extra clause to "close" some of the reverse engineering provisions not covered.
    - loup-vaillant 3y ago
      Copyright grounds? Copying stuff can violate copyright, but documenting stuff? No no no, you'd need a specific law to prevent disclosing of information. Maybe misappropriation of trade secrets?
    - mech422 3y ago
      I thought in the EU, reversing is (was?) expressly allowed for 'interoperability' - so if someone in EU reversed something and published it...others could then use it as it was 'public knowlege' ?
    - justinclift 3y ago
dontupvoteme 3y ago
So what happens when someone in e.g. China or Russia releases something who they can't practically prosecute, can everyone else then use it?
wakawaka28 3y ago
Isn't CUDA documentation thorough enough to reimplement it without reverse-engineering? (Serious question.)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hfgjbcgjbvg 3y ago
So dirty. Makes the whole industry look bad.

lunfard000 3y ago

I dont think China cares too much about what NVIDIA thinks considering the ban in place.

ActionHank 3y ago

So they just put up their hand and said they also want to give the EU money?

brookst 3y ago
At this point with the level of demand they have, it might be easier and cheaper to just not do business in the EU.
- jijijijij 3y ago
  Funny how nobody does that, eh?! Could be because the EU is the second biggest consumer market on this planet. But of course, they could totally focus on China, now third and rising, instead. Maybe they can even ask the CCP to help them with their IP claims and stuff.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Or it could be because the EU has not yet reached the tipping point where it’s not worth it, or it could be that they have but companies are adapting by reducing investment and it will take years for patterns to emerge. Not sure where the weird China stuff came from. Are you saying that as long as the EU is even slightly better than China we should celebrate it?
    - jijijijij 3y ago
      > Are you saying that as long as the EU is even slightly better than China we should celebrate it? No. I am saying, as long as the American market isn't enough for the growth necessities these giga corporations set themselves up to, they pretty much have no choice, but to go with the European market - since it's the second largest consumer market. And since the argument is about Nvidia being silly about IP stuff, the Chinese market - the third largest and therefore next best alternative to the European market - isn't exactly known to give a fuck about IP, at all, so good luck with that. Also: > EU has not yet reached... > EU is even slightly better than China... Jesus Christ. Throw your unread Atlas Shrugged copy into the cringe bin, and fucking touch some grass, for real.

samus 3y ago

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

salawat 3y ago
Note Nouveau is dead in the water due to DMCA 1201, plus Nvidia's use of secrutful FALCON units to cryptographically verify firmware signatures.
- samus 3y ago
  Recently, development has picked up again though. They basically surrendered and now use the proprietary blob. The Mesa driver supports Vulkan 1.3 and Zink will be used for OpenGL going forward. Now on to more performance optimization and maybe bringing up some of the other proprietary IP blocks...
  - salawat 3y ago
    Realistically, all that means is that Nouveau is giving in to the death of rights of First Sale, which is a fight I'm not willing to give up on fighting for yet even if every deep pocketed interest and it's sister seems to be swinging that way.
    - samus 3y ago
      I don't completely get your point I fear. Using the blob is simply accepting the fact that the cards are hamstrung without it. They won that round. Let's hope that AMD and Intel eventually get it together and come up with products that can slowly erode Nvidia's moat.
    - anticensor 3y ago
      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.

colechristensen 3y ago

The alternative is NVIDIA charging for what they're spending money on and making CUDA as big a cost as the hardware. I don't know what I agree with but hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. I wonder legally if it would work to instead have licensing that charged a reasonable fee to run CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware. Just don't enforce it for developers, but have it big enough and enforced enough so corporations would hesitate or pay... or just make it large enough to make it not make sense to run on non-NVIDIA cards.

shadowgovt 3y ago
> hardware-supported-software being free is a good thing, your competitors being able to use it for free is a bad thing. ... bad thing for whom? Especially having been in the unenviable position of needing to debug implementation errors in shader compilation, I'd argue that for the end user, it's much better if the software is not only usable for free, but open-source. To the extent that the ownership the hardware vendors place upon their software prevents this, I'd say that's a bad thing. If NVIDIA can't compete on hardware they're just bailing water from a sinking ship. All their competition has to do is provide and adopt a just-as-good open software standard on cheaper hardware and people will flock to it, NVIDIA will be forced to provide compatibility or become an also-ran, and they'll lose anyway.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  "All their competition has to do" is quite the assumption, when in fact CUDA and drivers is a very significant portion of the work NVIDIA does. NVIDIA is winning because of their software work, this is where they've added the most value to their product. NVIDIA can compete on hardware, but the reason AI/ML is where it is today rests largely on the investment in software NVIDIA has done in the last 20 years enabling these kinds of things. Everyone could be using the open source alternatives, but they're not because the OSS isn't as good because... nobody paid for it. I'm all for open source, you should be able to run whatever you want on your NVIDIA card (and you can, no walled gardens there), but it doesn't go as far as insisting that if someone wrote software it should be free.

j1elo 3y ago

I wonder how it's not a trivial workaround to have a separate, anonymous project with the sole scope of disassembling the code (and thus violating the license), while acting as knowledge source for emulators. This way, emulators wouldn't be violating any license, just using technical details learned from third party sources. The anonymous project itself would be attacked by Nvidia, and in case this succeeded, replicas of the repo would probably pop up quickly and easily. But good luck having a chinese Gitee repo closed for american copyright infringement!

mech422 3y ago
It appears from the comments here that just disassembling the nvidia code would NOT be a violation? it seems that only disassembling to use in a compatibility layer would be ? I believe, this 2 stage/project system was how DeCSS for DVDs worked? Someone cracked it and posted the code, which could them be picked up/used by others as it was 'public knowledge' or some such ??
- AstralStorm 3y ago
  It is already prohibited on copyright grounds. They put the extra clause to "close" some of the reverse engineering provisions not covered.
  - loup-vaillant 3y ago
    Copyright grounds? Copying stuff can violate copyright, but documenting stuff? No no no, you'd need a specific law to prevent disclosing of information. Maybe misappropriation of trade secrets?
  - mech422 3y ago
    I thought in the EU, reversing is (was?) expressly allowed for 'interoperability' - so if someone in EU reversed something and published it...others could then use it as it was 'public knowlege' ?
  - justinclift 3y ago

dontupvoteme 3y ago

So what happens when someone in e.g. China or Russia releases something who they can't practically prosecute, can everyone else then use it?

wakawaka28 3y ago

Isn't CUDA documentation thorough enough to reimplement it without reverse-engineering? (Serious question.)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hfgjbcgjbvg 3y ago

So dirty. Makes the whole industry look bad.