Once you already bought the NVIDIA cards what’s the point
Another benefit could be support for platforms that nvidia doesn't care to release CUDA SDKs for.
As a bonus, with open source platforms you are much less subject to whims of company licensing. If tomorrow Nvidia decided to change their licensing strategy and pricing, how many here will be affected by it? OSS doesn’t do that. And even if the project goes in a random direction you don’t like, someone likely forks it to keep going in the right direction (see pfsense/opnsense).
This is just wishful thinking. Anything close to real professional use, not related to IT, and closed source is king: office work, CAD, video editing, music production, and those domains immediately came to mind. Nowhere there open source can seriously challenge commercial, closed sourced competitors.
Yes, in any of those domains one can name open source products, but they are far from "winning" or "the better option".
Commercial, closed source products generally benefit from a monopoly within a specific problem domain or some kind of regulatory capture. I don’t think that means an open source alternative isn’t desirable or viable, just that competing in those contexts is much more difficult without some serious investment—be it political, monetary, or through many volunteered hours of work.
Another comment mentioned Blender which is a great example of a viable competitor in a specific problem domain. There are others if you look at things like PCB circuit design, audio production/editing, and a surprising amount of fantastic computer emulators.
In general you confirmed my point by saying that competing in domains is much more difficult. And open source isn’t a key to a win.
In the grand scheme of things I believe open source at least provides serious competition and that commercial software has its own work to do.
Also, a lot of not all professional work uses open source components. Research is a field where it shines and there it matters a lot.
Adobe has to work for its money as well as its competitors get more powerful by the day. And everyone hates their creative cloud.
Anything else is moving the goalposts.
ex - I think Adobe is in the middle of this swing now, Blender is eating marketshare, and Krita is pretty incredible.
Unity is also struggling (I've seen a LOT of folks moving to Godot, or going back to unreal [which is not open, but is source-available - because having access matters]).
CAD hasn't quite tipped yet - but Freecad is getting better constantly. I used to default to Fusion360 and Solidworks, but I haven't had to break those out for personal use in the last 5 years or so (CNC/3d printing needs). It's not ready for professional use yet, but it now feels like how blender felt in 2010 - usable, if not quite up to par.
Office work... is a tough one - to date, Excel still remains king for the folks who actually need Excel. Everything else has moved to free (although not necessarily open source) editors. None of my employers have provided word/powerpoint for more than a decade now - and I haven't missed not having them.
I would argue that PDFs have gone the opensource route though, and that used to be a big name in office work (again - Adobe screwed up).
I don't really do any music production or video editing, so I can't really comment other than to say that ffmpeg is eating the world for commercial solutions under the hood, and it is solidly open. And on the streaming side of "Video" OBS studio is basically the only real player I'm aware of.
So... I don't really think it's wishful thinking. I think opensource is genuinely better most times, it just plays the long and slow game to getting there.
I'd be glad to be proven wrong.
Naw, just try to find a decent PDF editor. You will have a hard time. PDF display is fairly open, but PDF editing is not. PDFs are the dominant format for exchange of signed documents, still a big name in office work, and Adobe still controls the PDF editing app market.
I would love it if open source was winning in the imaging, audio or DCC markets, but it’s just not even close yet. Blender hasn’t touched pro market share, it’s just being used by lots and lots of hobbyists because it’s free to play with. Just did a survey of the film & VFX studios at Siggraph, and they aren’t even looking in Blender’s direction yet, they are good with Houdini, Maya, etc. Some of this has to do with fears and lack of understanding of open source licensing - studios are afraid of the legalities, and Ton has talked about needing to help educate them. Some new & small shops use Blender, but new & small shops come and go all the time, the business is extremely tough.
Office work is moving to Microsoft alternatives like Google Office products. That is not open source, not source available, and for most medium to large companies it’s not free either (though being “free” as in beer is irrelevant to your point). The company just pays behind the scenes and most employees don’t know it, or it’s driven by ad & analytics revenue.
Unix utilities and Linux server software are places where open source has some big “wins”, but unfortunately when it comes to content creation software, it still is wishful thinking. It could change in the future, and I honestly hope it does, but it’s definitely not there yet.
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
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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)
Besides how they've "opened" their drivers by moving all the proprietary code on-GPU, I don't expect this to happen at all. Nvidia has no incentive to give away their IP, and the antitrust cases that people are trying to build against them border on nonsense. Nvidia monopolizes CUDA like Amazon monopolizes AWS, their "abuse" is the specialization they offer to paying customers... which harms the market how?
What really makes me lament the future is the fact that we had a chance to kill CUDA. Khronos wanted OpenCL to be a serious competitor, and if it wasn't specifically for the fact that Apple and AMD stopped funding it we might have a cross-platform GPU compute layer that outperforms CUDA. Today's Nvidia dominance is a result of the rest of the industry neglecting their own GPGPU demand.
Nvidia only "wins" because their adversaries would rather fight each other than work together to beat a common competitor. It's an expensive lesson for the industry about adopting open standards when people ask you to, or you suffer the consequences of having nothing competitive.
Nobody is forcing you to buy GPUs.
Your logic is flawed in the sense that enough people could also simply write alternatives to Torch, which, by the way, is already open source.
Nobody is forcing you to live under a roof.
Nobody is forcing you to eat.
I just found it highly unlikely that Nvidia would change its ways due to this, and I don't really see how we're being "squeezed". Nvidia are delivering amazing products (as are AMD), and it is not going to be any cheaper this way.
Building this kind of hardware is not something a hacker can do over the weekend.
Yet to get a card with 8GB more than one with comparable logical performance, you'd be looking at hundreds (or thousands in the case of "machine learning" cards) of dollars.
it's worth noting that "NVIDIA software stack" is an imprecise term. the driver is the part that has the datacenter usage term, and the open-kernel-driver bypasses that. the CUDA stack itself does not have the datacenter driver clause, the only caveat is that you can't run it on third-party hardware. So ZLUDA/GpuOcelot is still verboten, if you are using the CUDA libraries.
Step 2: Port to other GPUs.
At least I assume that is the plan.
why not do this first? because the existing closed sourced CUDA already runs well on nvidia chips. Replicating it with an open stack, while ideologically useful, is going to sap resources away from the porting of it to other GPUs (where the real value can be had - by stopping the nvidia monopoly on ai chips).
Good luck getting a multi-user GPU setup going, for example.
It super sucks when the hardware is capable, but licensing doesn't "allow" it.
Anyway I wonder why amd never challenged nvidia on that market... It smells a bit like amd and nvidia secretly agreed to not compete against each other.
Opencl exists but is abandoned.