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Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver
(www.phoronix.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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I get why the Linux folks are doing this, but I don't expect that it will make them popular with anyone who actually uses Nvidia drivers on Linux (which is a lot of people). I'm sure that my employer will choose up-to-date Nvidia drivers over up-to-date versions of the kernel, at least in the short term. In the long term it probably won't be an issue since Nvidia will figure something out, but if it did become an issue then ultimately Nvidia driver support is non-negotiable for the company where I work.
(No one cares what a small tech company does, but the big guys need Nvidia too so it should be possible to piggyback on whatever they do.)
The group to be annoyed at are Nvidia. Plain and simple.
For most people, principle takes a backseat to pragmatics. If your livelihood is training ML models on thousands of nVidia cards or whatever, you care less about who to be mad at and more about not laying off your staff and shutting the doors. You can't replace nVidia. You can replace the latest kernel.
If your livelihood depends on a company breaking the law, you've got other issues.
Nvidia could choose to follow the law, their customers could choose to support them in that.
Part of the reason you can't replace Nvidia, is because they get ahead by breaking the law. This makes it harder to compete with them.
Now you're stuck with only Nvidia, and welcome to monopoly hell. A bit exaggerated I know, but it's his it happens.
That's a pretty naive view of the world. If I buy 50,000 Android devices to support my company's field sales operation, I'm not going to collect them all and put them in a trash compactor just because Oracle decides to pick a copyright fight with Google. If you work for any large-ish company, your employer is probably engaged in dozens of active lawsuits right now. That's just how the world works.
And that's kind of the discussion here.
Some people are annoyed at the Linux Devs because "fuck it, everyone breaks the law and it doesn't matter". Some people are annoyed at Nvidia because they'd like to uphold or social contracts.
In don't think it's naive to want to live in a world and support a society that supports the law. I do think we have bigger issues that people are happy with this behaviour and are actively defending it.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t want companies to obey the laws. I’m specifically responding to the idea of "if your business relies on companies breaking the law, you have bigger problems". The idea that you’ll dramatically tear apart and rebuild your supply chain literally every week as one company or another is sued for something that doesn’t concern you is what’s naive. Even just looking at patents, every company that writes software is a time bomb, because there are hundreds of thousands of bullshit patents that cover extremely broad and obvious ideas. This can’t be your problem, or you’ll never actually get around to doing the thing your company does.