the open kernel driver also fundamentally breaks the limitation about geforce gpus not being licensed for use in the datacenter. that provision is a driver provision and CUDA does not follow the same license as the driver... really the only significant limitation is that you aren't allowed to use the CUDA toolkit to develop for non-NVIDIA hardware, and some license notice requirements if you redistribute the sample projects or other sample sourcecode. and yeah they paid to develop it, it's proprietary source code, that's reasonable overall.
so yeah, I'm not sure where the assertion of "no progress" and "nothing meaningful" and "this changes nothing" come from, other than pure fanboyism/anti-fans. before you couldn't write a libre CUDA userland even if you wanted to - the kernel side wasn't there. And now you can, and this allows retiming and clock-up of supported gpus even with nouveau-style libre userlands. Which of course don't grow on trees, but it's still progress.
honestly it's kinda embarrassing that grown-ass adults are still getting their positions from what is functionally just some sick burn in a 2004 viral video or whatever, to the extent they actively oppose the company moving in the direction of libre software at all. but I think with the "linus torvalds" citers, you just can't reason those people out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. Not only is it an emotionally-driven (and fanboy-driven) mindset, but it's literally not even their own position to begin with, it's just something they're absorbing from youtube via osmosis.
Apple debates and NVIDIA debates always come down to the anti-fans bringing down the discourse. It's honestly sad. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
it also generally speaks to the long-term success and intellectual victory of the GPL/FSF that people see proprietary software as somehow inherently bad and illegitimate... even when source is available, in some cases. Like CUDA's toolchain and libraries/ecosystem is pretty much the ideal example of a company paying to develop a solution that would not otherwise have been developed, in a market that was (at the time) not really interested until NVIDIA went ahead and proved the value. You don't get to ret-con every single successful software project as being retroactively open-source just because you really really want to run it on a competitor's hardware. But people now have this mindset that if it's not libre then it's somehow illegitimate.
Again, most CUDA stuff is distributed as source, if you want to modify and extend it you can do so, subject to the terms of the CUDA license... and that's not good enough either.
https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/eula/index.html
ctrl-f "datacenter": none
so yeah, I'm not sure where the assertion of "no progress" and "nothing meaningful" and "this changes nothing" come from, other than pure fanboyism/anti-fans. before you couldn't write a libre CUDA userland even if you wanted to - the kernel side wasn't there. And now you can, and this allows retiming and clock-up of supported gpus even with nouveau-style libre userlands. Which of course don't grow on trees, but it's still progress.
honestly it's kinda embarrassing that grown-ass adults are still getting their positions from what is functionally just some sick burn in a 2004 viral video or whatever, to the extent they actively oppose the company moving in the direction of libre software at all. but I think with the "linus torvalds" citers, you just can't reason those people out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into. Not only is it an emotionally-driven (and fanboy-driven) mindset, but it's literally not even their own position to begin with, it's just something they're absorbing from youtube via osmosis.
Apple debates and NVIDIA debates always come down to the anti-fans bringing down the discourse. It's honestly sad. https://paulgraham.com/fh.html
it also generally speaks to the long-term success and intellectual victory of the GPL/FSF that people see proprietary software as somehow inherently bad and illegitimate... even when source is available, in some cases. Like CUDA's toolchain and libraries/ecosystem is pretty much the ideal example of a company paying to develop a solution that would not otherwise have been developed, in a market that was (at the time) not really interested until NVIDIA went ahead and proved the value. You don't get to ret-con every single successful software project as being retroactively open-source just because you really really want to run it on a competitor's hardware. But people now have this mindset that if it's not libre then it's somehow illegitimate.
Again, most CUDA stuff is distributed as source, if you want to modify and extend it you can do so, subject to the terms of the CUDA license... and that's not good enough either.