Re: Change of license of Nvidia drivers

[Lumin <cdluminate@gmail.com>]

Hi Jerome,

Thank you for putting forward this issue.

I guess the maintainers have noticed this problem, as per changelog of
this upload:

  nvidia-graphics-drivers (387.34-1) experimental; urgency=medium

Anyway I'm pinging the driver maintainer.

> Hi all,
> 
> Maybe I am not asking to the right people but you may redirect me to
> the appropriate list within the debian community.
> 
> Some facts: Nvidia changed the license agreement on the 21st of
> december 2017 for their driver making it illegal to use these drivers
> inside a datacenter except for crypto-currency mining, unless you use
> them on tesla-class hardware.
> 
> I doubt this is legal in most countries as it was common to purchase
> servers with Titan-cards and those servers can no-more be used since
> the beginning of the year (even if purchased under the former EULA).
> 
> Debian registers all licenses and the "nvidia license" is referenced
> for the non-free repository. I would be interested in debian's official
> point of view as the new EULA clearly looks incompatible with
> open-source software.
> 
> Thanks for your thought
> -- 
> Jérôme Kieffer
> 
> PS: debian science may be interested as it comes down to computing on GPU...
> 
> This is the official statement I got from an nvidia representative:
> """
> GeForce and TITAN GPUs were never designed for datacenter deployments with the complex hardware, software, and
> thermal requirements for 24x7 operation, where there are often multi-stack racks. To clarify this, we recently added
> a provision to our GeForce-specific EULA to discourage potential misuse of our GeForce and TITAN products in
> demanding, large-scale enterprise environments.
> """
>