On 12/31/24 5:41 AM, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
This was the first I've ever heard of that rule, especially since Nvidia makes the binary available to distros for the purpose of building packages -
No, NVIDIA makes binaries available. Period. What you can do with these binaries after you have downloaded them from NVIDIA is subject to the license agreement:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/geforce-license/
This license agreement does not mention "distros" or "building packages".
It is quite broad: 1.1 Subject to the terms of this Agreement, NVIDIA grants you a non-exclusive, revocable, non-transferable and non-sublicensable (except as expressly provided in this Agreement) license to: a. Install and use copies of the SOFTWARE, b. Modify and create derivative works of any portion of the SOFTWARE delivered by NVIDIA in source code format, c. Deploy, for your own use, the SOFTWARE on infrastructure you own or lease, and d. Distribute the SOFTWARE provided for use with operating systems distributed under the terms of an OSI-approved open source license as listed by the Open Source Initiative at https://opensource.org, provided that (i) the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for uncompressing of compressed files) and (ii) this Agreement is provided to each SOFTWARE recipient. and, none of the "2. Limitations." apply to the way it is currently being used. The software remains under the Nvidia license, the binary is not modified, changed or reverse engineered in any way, and the license agreement remains included. Do you know what provision Andrei was referring to on the factory list? I don't see anything here? -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.