Hacker News Reader

Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

If I'm not using Nvidia hardware, and I don't use Nvidia drivers, and I haven't agreed to their EULA then why would I care?

Emulation is legally protected both explicitly and through legal precedence. The replication of APIs for compatibility purposes has been argued to the US Supreme Court and found to not be copyrightable. At least within some pretty broad scope.

IANAL, but I fail to see what legal basis Nvidia is relying on. For a single user or company who owns no Nvidia hardware this feels moot. For a company with existing Nvidia hardware I could see them having an argument, kinda. But wouldn't that be squarely in the anti-competitive behavior wheelhouse?

View on HN

> If I'm not using Nvidia hardware, and I don't use Nvidia drivers, and I haven't agreed to their EULA then why would I care?

If the CUDA software you want to run on ZLUDA contains first-party Nvidia libraries, which it usually does, you have to care about how those dependencies are licensed.

Yeah, I commented below at someone who mentioned that. I wasn't aware that people were distributing Nvidia binary libraries with their apps.

EULA or not, it would fail anti-competitive laws. In the US they also avoided the Copyright question by saying it was fair use.

> But wouldn't that be squarely in the anti-competitive behavior wheelhouse?

Precisely why they are making that statement. The goal is to threaten people who attempt to avoid CUDA

The application developer has to agree to the terms of the CUDA toolkit. If ZLUDA or other mechanisms require the developer to opt in, that could cause a problem. Perhaps someone more familiar can let us know if that's how it works?

Hah, I wonder if they're big enough now for the European Commission to fine them over this.

$50+ billion in expected annual operating income going forward ($13b in the latest quarter with rapid growth).

More EU budget money coming right up.

Europe, the fine continent :-)

isnt Asia part of Europe?

No, however Asia and Europe would be parts of Eurasia, or of Afro-Eurasia.

My joke would be more accurate referring to the EU :-)

> If I'm not using Nvidia hardware, and I don't use Nvidia drivers, and I haven't agreed to their EULA then why would I care?

So in your entire life, you have never downloaded an Nvidia driver and clicked through the EULA? Once you agree, you've agreed.

That is not how contract law works...

Even if they had, they agreed to a specific version, not all future versions. That's why the EULA comes up again and again if it changes.

Or am I totally wrong here?

But does that matter? if someone tried a software or a service and then terminated or quit that, then does that end-user agreement still applies in perpetuity? Let say I cancel a cable TV subscription or quit MySpaces, do I still really bound by their EULA?

If you don't own Nvidia hardware why should download an Nvidia driver?

Because Nvidia's libraries, whether acquired through them or otherwise, are (currently) required for this trick to work.

You can get the libraries without installer, so no installer, no EULA, no acceptance of it.

I don’t think agreeing or not to EULA has any value in EU. At least in France were consumer rights are codified and so an EULA cannot limit these legal rights.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com