Save us, EU. You're our only hope. Sincerely, USA
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2024
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This keeps happening—can you lot make some laws for a change?
Edit: oh wait not like that
California tries its best... There's a bunch of pro-consumer laws that other states don't have. There's the CCPA which is similar to GDPR (including the right to know and the right to be forgotten). You must be able to cancel a service easily online if you can sign up online. Store gift cards aren't allowed to have expiration dates. Gift cards with less than $10 on them must be redeemable for cash. Stricter laws against false advertising. And a bunch of other useful laws.
Not as good as the Australian Consumer Law, but better than pretty much every other US state.
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Cries in britland
You are welcome to rejoin
Actually probably not. Not without major concessions. The pound will have to go which they will never accept unless they have absolutely no other choice
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Nvidia: bans platform translation layers for CUDA
Meanwhile AMD: is forbidden from releasing an open source HDMI 2.1 driver supporting 4K@120hz because of HDMI Forums requirements.
Oops. Someone hacked the server and now the code is leaked online. How terrible.
DisplayPort gang?
Sadly also not an open standard, in reality but they are friendlier to FOSS.
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Accidental DisplayPort guy checking in. I didn't even know it was a thing until I bought my graphics card. It seems like I dummied my way into some good tech.
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These companies are wielding way too much power if they are not afraid to act like this in the open. Bring back making the board of executives and C Suites lives hell when a company so much as inconveniences you.
I want to see fines that have real teeth. No flat rates. Some defined amount per violation, in addition to forfeiture of all revenue derived from or connected to the violation(s). It might be complex to figure out what revenue that applies to inside a large corporation, so to help with the assessment you get a group of government auditors attached to your company for as long as the assessment takes. You pay their wages and provide them with whatever office space &etc they require, and they have a position on your executive board and full oversight of company operations until your debt to society is fully paid.
Regulatory violations should risk ending the company. If you can't run a profitable business legally then you shouldn't be running a business.
Personally, I think it would be easier for all involved to just fine based on a percentage of global annual revenue from the date of the violation to present. If they want personhood so bad, then they can have this too.
Edit for an example: let's say Intel does anticompetitive behavior 15 years ago and a court case finds them liable for damages today. Add up the last 15 years worth of global revenue, and take a percentage of that.
Making it easy is precisely not the point. Having to deal with auditors combing through your accounting records and overseeing your operations until every dollar of illegally gained revenue is accounted for is the point.
The consequence should be onerous, cumbersome and embarrassing for the company.
I get what you mean, but I prefer massive fines due immediately vs expensive and drawn out processes. Using my example, the very absolute bottom of the barrel Intel's fine could be is a percentage of over $500B (Intel's revenue in 2009 was $35B, multiplied by 15). Even at 1% based on this floor, the fine would be over $5B.
Yeah fuck this.
... What's a translation layer?
In general, it translates instructions into something readable by whats accessing it. A popular translation layer on Lemmy is Proton. Its how the Steam Deck can play all those windows games.
Got a Windows app you want to run on Linux? Wine and Proton are well known translation layers.
I guess Graphics Cards are similar. CUDA is basically the NVIDIA equivalent of .exe I think.
Cuda is an Nvidia specific method for using a graphics card to do computation (not just graphics), like physics simulations.
Translation layers would let you use software designed for other graphics cards to work with Cuda, or to let Cuda software work on other graphics cards
So nvidia designed something and they don't want other companies to use it?
CUDA was there first and has established itself as the standard for GPGPU ("general purpose GPU" aka calculating non-graphics stuff on a graphics card). There are many software packages out there that only support CUDA, especially in the lucrative high-performance computing market.
Most software vendors have no intention of supporting more than one API since CUDA works and the market isn't competitive enough for someone to need to distinguish themselves though better API support.
Thus Nvidia have a lock on a market that regularly needs to buy expensive high-margin hardware and they don't want to share. So they made up a rule that nobody else is allowed to write out use something that makes CUDA software work with non-Nvidia GPUs.
That's anticompetitive but it remains to be seen if it's anticompetitive enough for the EU to step in.
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So a knife maker can now forbid me to cut chicken with it?
Can a EULA ban fair use? Google v Oracle might have something to say about this.
It can say whatever it wants unless invalidated by a court or an existing law saying otherwise.
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Probably depends on your country's laws. Here in Estonia most EULAs aren't valid because pressing accept on those isn't legally binding.
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I give it about 10 years before the EU is invaded by the US after corporate lobbying
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If translation layer can be banned with EULA how is wine not dead yet? M$ loves Linux or what?
MS loves money. If Linux makes them money, great. If not, fuck it.
"...because it makes us money" could be put at the end of any slogan to make it 100% honest.
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The EULA of the CUDA SDK bans reverse engineering output of the SDK to make translation layers (and such compatibility aids in general).
That makes it more legally dangerous and/or harder for devs. It has no effect on anyone not using the SDK.
How is that Nvidia can ban reverse engineering and for example Nintendo can't. I'm sure they would love to just say in EULA that sorry but reverse engineering Switch is prohibited therefore every emulator is illegal
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This has been said time and time again but fuck Nvidia. Preventing compatibility layers ensures games and programs that need this stuff are extra unreliable, bloated and enshittified.
They can prohibit whatever they want, but how enforceable is it? Does Nvidia intend to play whack a mole by checking for translation layers?
Now imagine Microsoft banning the translation of DirectX to Vulkan. Could they do that? That would kill gaming on Linux in a snap.
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