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EULA permits the companies to have grounds to take someone to court. Their choice to prosecute. It's a reserved right more so than one that they use 100%. In t

EULA permits the companies to have grounds to take someone to court. Their choice to prosecute. It's a reserved right more so than one that they use 100%. In this case translating CUDA can allow AMD to chip away at NVidia's market share.

adastra22 3y ago
Not if the person being sued never “signed” the EULA.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Nvidia cares about the people reverse-engineering CUDA, who don't have anything to reverse-engineer unless they actually download the SDK. Of course, when you download the SDK it has an associated license.
  - TehCorwiz 3y ago
    It's also possible to do a clean-room reverse where one group tests the hardware and software and writes specifications and another group who has never seen the hardware or docs then does the implementation. This has been legally tested and protected going back to at least the early 1980s.
    - mandevil 3y ago
      It is possible, but a) it is expensive as hell to get enough engineers whom you can prove in court have no exposure to the original software (most SWE's would get some exposure just naturally in college nowadays, leave alone at any sort of job) and b) CUDA is constantly changing and updating and so you need to have this expensive clean-room process going constantly or else you will fall behind. The most famous case of clean-room reverse engineering is for the original BIOS chips back in the early 1980's, where the chips themselves couldn't change- they were hardware! It's going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to do that for software packages that change regularly.
      - TehCorwiz 3y ago
        I disagree on Cuda changing constantly. The hardware is stable once sold and new devices are usually backwards compatible by at least a version or two. The API is also locked down for already deployed versions, can't go pulling the rug from paying customers. However, new versions of both hardware and Cuda do introduce new things that'll need addressed. I don't think it's much of a moving target though.
      - Me1000 3y ago
        > it is expensive as hell Probably, but Nvidia's market cap suggests there's more than $2 trillion in reasons to front that expense.

adastra22 3y ago

Not if the person being sued never “signed” the EULA.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
LoganDark 3y ago
Nvidia cares about the people reverse-engineering CUDA, who don't have anything to reverse-engineer unless they actually download the SDK. Of course, when you download the SDK it has an associated license.
- TehCorwiz 3y ago
  It's also possible to do a clean-room reverse where one group tests the hardware and software and writes specifications and another group who has never seen the hardware or docs then does the implementation. This has been legally tested and protected going back to at least the early 1980s.
  - mandevil 3y ago
    It is possible, but a) it is expensive as hell to get enough engineers whom you can prove in court have no exposure to the original software (most SWE's would get some exposure just naturally in college nowadays, leave alone at any sort of job) and b) CUDA is constantly changing and updating and so you need to have this expensive clean-room process going constantly or else you will fall behind. The most famous case of clean-room reverse engineering is for the original BIOS chips back in the early 1980's, where the chips themselves couldn't change- they were hardware! It's going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to do that for software packages that change regularly.
    - TehCorwiz 3y ago
      I disagree on Cuda changing constantly. The hardware is stable once sold and new devices are usually backwards compatible by at least a version or two. The API is also locked down for already deployed versions, can't go pulling the rug from paying customers. However, new versions of both hardware and Cuda do introduce new things that'll need addressed. I don't think it's much of a moving target though.
    - Me1000 3y ago
      > it is expensive as hell Probably, but Nvidia's market cap suggests there's more than $2 trillion in reasons to front that expense.