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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 hardwar

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.

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.