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Comment by YetAnotherNick | Hacker News Reader

Comparison with 4090 is irrelevant as 4090 legally cannot legally be used for commercial usecase, and most companies just follow the law.

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Sorry what does that mean? There are many people creating content and software for commercial use cases with these cards and I've never seen a EULA anywhere preventing this.

YetAnotherNick is probably referring to the geforce eula [1] which says:

"Customer may not [...] provide commercial hosting services with the SOFTWARE. [...] The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted."

So if you were e.g. an ad agency artist using a 4090 at your desk to generate images for commercial use - that's fine, because it's not in a datacenter, and the commercial services you're providing with it aren't hosting.

I've never heard of nvidia taking any enforcement action, or defining precisely when an office becomes a datacenter - I suspect this is mostly to ensure the big cloud providers don't offer 4090s.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/drivers/geforce-license/

Yeah I'm aware of that but that's pretty distinct from "cannot legally be used for commercial usecase".

I can't edit my comment now, but by commercial I meant "using 4090 for commercial purpose" that is renting, not not being allowed to create commercial content using the card.

Reading my comment again, obviously it wrong and I should have been more careful with the wording.

I wonder if places like RunPod have a special agreement with NVidia, there's some way they're working around this (not installing the drivers?), or if they're just flagrantly offering it as they offer several consumer card options in what's presumably a datacenter environment.

This limitation doesn’t really apply anymore with the open kernel driver. They can’t stop you from using a GPL-licensed driver in a datacenter or any other way you want.

Wait, they explicitly allowed to use cards for blockchain and prohibited for anything else?

Why/how is this even legal?

If you have any sources for that claim, you should post them here. As it stands, it's a pretty unusual statement.

IMHO it's the against the EULA to rent a 4090 - and this is why the big cloud platforms don't offer any. But using a 4090 in a company's own datacenter should be fine.

RunPod is fairly large and openly advertises the consumer cards. I wonder if they have an agreement?

Lot of companies offering 4090 leases, heavily doubt that only cloud gamers ans AI hobbyist rent them.

Lol, what? Of course it can. Nvidia can say they don't allow it in their user agreement, but last time I checked user agreements don't form actual legal law. Nvidia can sue you for breaking the agreement(I wonder what for, exactly?) But that's about it.

The worst thing that can happen is Nvidia declining any warranty repairs on these cards as they've been used outside of the intended use. But it's definitely not a legal issue.

And EULAs in general are just not enforceable outside of the US.

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