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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

If true then Nvidia has gone nuts. There is no way that they can control what end users of their products do with their products and/or their software post download to the extent where they are going to have a say in what locality you can use their software and where not.

Utterly ridiculous. For a company that has seen my solid support so far I'm extremely disappointed.

Could someone fluent in Japanese please confirm the claim in the title?

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It's true, here is the updated license: http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licen....

Text:

  No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment,
  except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

So, once again proof that open source is the only way to go.

Open-source drivers don't even support Tesla, not to mention Volta. An EULA challenge seems to the way to go here. I'll be emailing legal for advice once I get back to work.

I think the point is less using nouveau drivers for nvidia hardware as it is we should have never accepted CUDA as a standard since the implementation isn't free. Proprietary standards leave us at the mercy of the owners.

There's no date on the page itself, and the link contains the string "March2009". Is this really a recent change?

EDIT: just tried to download a driver, and this is the page that gets displayed.

Back in the 90's Borland got many customers pissed off, as they including a clause on their EULA preventing them to use Borland tools to write compilers.

It was quickly removed, given the backslash.

What’s interesting to me is seeing a physical tool company enclosing a “EULA” on something like a router but, saying you can’t use their physical bit to make other tools.

This seems no different than Tesla prohibiting use of AutoPilot for gainful ridesharing.

A large amount of computing equipment is sold with the restriction that it not be used to control a nuclear power plant.

Did you just make that up?

Safety critical systems integrators only buy computing equipment explicitly designed to be safety critical. That's a requirement from the system designer (or possibly the law), not the other way around.

If a nuclear plant designer go npm install random package that doesn't explicitly say it's not designed for nuclear plants no amount of lawyers will be able to sue the package maintainer if it fails.

> Did you just make that up?

You could have just googled "nuclear power EULA" to see how common this is, instead of throwing around accusations.

I mean, it's actually very common

To underscore this, go look at the Java license agreement, which forbids its use in any life critical environment

You can't even use Java to raise and lower the wooden arm in front of a toll bridge

Yes we all know EULA's contain a lot of moronic crap, just because Company A includes moronic things in their EULA should not be an excuse for Company B to include equally moronic things in theirs.

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