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Comment by AndrewKemendo | Hacker News Reader

This could be a big deal if we have an actual alternative to CUDA

I can’t see NVIDIA letting this just exist

My opinion is that CUDA is not the mote keeping the others out - it's the CUDNN (and CUBLAS), more specifically the level to which they are optimized.

I'm not even certain optimisation matters. I can crash my machine (AMD graphics) with a stock Debian install by letting something attempt BLAS on the GPU.

The situation is starting to improve though. Installed a bunch of libraries from https://repo.radeon.com/rocm/apt/5.4 jammy main and the crashes got less frequent. I don't have a lot of faith in AMD to deliver reliable BLAS libraries at this point, but it could happen. The hardware is there, I just don't think they're prioritising supporting the right places in the distribution chain or supporting consumer-level graphics.

How about something like MAGMA?

No idea. But if it goes through OpenCl it will likely expose the same bugs.

I do find it strange that AMD is not allocating more resources to ROCM, given that that seems to be where the money is, at least from my viewpoint. I guess they have been able to sell more cards than they could manufacture, but that seems to be changing.

And on what legal ground would NVIDIA have to take this down?

When you have Nvidia money you don't need grounds to sue, the lawyers will think of something and drag any open-source devs through years-long suits.

The only saving grace would be Oracle v Google which established the de jure that an API isn't copyrightable.

APIs weren't copyrightable before Oracle v Google. There was plenty of precedent saying that. For example, before they were called Oracle, they built a clone of IBM SEQUEL.

The main concern with Oracle v Google was that the court would ignore or misinterpret the existing precedent.

A secondary concern was that a Google employee formerly worked on Java at Sun (and/or Oracle), and copy-pasted some implementation source code from oracle to google's code bases. There was a real possibility the "APIs aren't copyrightable" precedent would stand, but the courts would rule that Google couldn't continue distributing Dalvik.

I thought that Oracle v Google established that APIs are copyrightable, but Google's copying met the terms for fair use?

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