The point might not necessarily be for consumers Linus wasn’t writing Linux for consumers (arguably the Linux kernel team still isn’t), he needed a Unix-like k

The point might not necessarily be for consumers Linus wasn’t writing Linux for consumers (arguably the Linux kernel team still isn’t), he needed a Unix-like kernel on a platform which didn’t support it Nvidia is placed with CUDA in a similar way to how Bell was with Unix in the late 1980s. I’m not sure if a legal “CUDA Wars” is possible in the way the Unix Wars was, but something needs to give Nvidia has a monopoly and many organisations and projects will come about to rectify it, I think this is one example The most interesting thing to see moving forward is where the most just place is to draw the line for Nvidia they deserve remuneration for CUDA, but the question is how much? The axe of the Leviathan (US government) is slowly swinging towards them, and I expect Nvidia to pre-emptively open up CUDA just enough to keep them (and most of us) happy After a certain point for a technology so low in the “stack” of the global economy, more powerful actors than Nvidia will have to step in and clear the IP bottleneck Tech giants are powerful and influence people more than the government, but I think people forget how powerful the government can be when push comes to shove over such an important piece of technology ————— PS my comparison of CUDA to Unix isn’t perfect, mostly as Nvidia has a hardware monopoly as it stands, but as they don’t fab it themselves it’s just a design/information at the end of the day. There’s nothing physically preventing other companies producing CUDA hardware, just obvious legal and business obstacles Perhaps a better comparison would be Texas Instruments trying to monopolise integrated circuits (they never tried). But if Fairchild Semiconductors hadn’t’ve independently discovered ICs, we might have seen a much slower logistic curve than we have had with Moore’s law (assuming competition is proportional to innovation)