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But what prevents anyone from developing an OpenCUDA?

It's been almost 25 years ago, but this was the crux of the Sun Microsystems v. Microsoft lawsuit. It's why OpenJDK exists. Even three years ago the Supreme Court ruled that you can't copyright an API.

I mean, it feels breathtakingly obvious. Not only is there historical precedents for just doing this, there're legal precedents as well.

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Cost. What prevents someone from making something new to fight against an incumbent? Cost of entry most of the time. That's the mentality in the lock-in. Make switching too expensive and difficult to even bother. Possible? Yes, but hard enough.

When someone manages to overcome the cost and commoditize what lock-in was walling - it improves things. Even better if someone manages to do it while breaking lock-in itself. Sort of like writing a wrapper to run CUDA on non Nvidia GPUs (what ZLUDA is doing).

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