Hacker News Reader

Comment by prcrstntr | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia probably encrypts firmware to protect IP rather than to block Linux users; maintaining open drivers across platforms is expensive, and they’ve historically prioritized Linux for datacenter

View on HN

This kind of thing is far better at locking down the average user than preventing competitors from reverse engineering what they're doing. (much like DRM is pretty good at stopping your average consumer from doing what they want with their media but pretty bad at stopping the pirates getting access to the same content).

Protecting IP is an excuse given for all manner of computer-aided fuckery, certainly

Power per compute is ludicrously important to data centers. This isn't some small IP, it's a potential market differentiator.

edit: even more important for mobile computers

Yes, it seems a lot of companies can make a lot of money from fuckery like controlling what their customers can do with the devices they sell and deliberately sabotaging those devices for some customers via this control. What's your point? Am I supposed to support any practice a company can find a way to make money off of? Generally speaking I'm more against fuckery that's profitable for a company than fuckery that isn't, because the latter is at least likely to stop naturally

> What's your point?

That them trying to protect IP around something very profitable isn't crazy. That not being fully supported in Linux, when the product was literally designed around Windows, also isn't crazy or really evidence of anything, including evil (see the whole fucking history of Linux compatibility of made-for-Windows hardware).

Maybe let them cook.

In general, the history of linux compatibility for nvidia specifically has been the research and open-source communities dragging them kicking and screaming into compliance while they do significant work to prevent compatibility via fuckery. I've been doing work impacted by this continuously since before GPGPU programming became popular. I'm not a beneficiary of nvidia's deals with microsoft or their stock price in general, so I see no reason I should "let them cook"

Boo hoo. The biggest, most leather jacketest company in the world decides it can't maintain a Linux firmware. The same thing it's entire server system depends on. Omg why would that be??

It obviously can't be because of ulterior motives!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com