Huh? Why the sarcasm? You think it's a good thing that someone besides the person who owns the hardware has the final say on what the hardware is allowed to be used for?
That's not actually a thing? I specifically moved away from Nvidia because
1) they choose (chose?) not to supprt standard display protocols that Wayland compositors target with their drivers (annoying, but not the end of the world)
2) they cryptographically lock users out of writing their own drivers for their own graphics cards (which should be illegal and is exactly contradictory to "that's not actually a thing").
Again: look into why the Nouveau driver performance is limited.
This seems to be more about certain devices (consumer-grade GPUs) in certain settings (data centers), though I do question how enforceable it actually is. My guess is that it can only apply when you try to get discounts from bulk-ordering GPUs.
Also, was there any followup to this story? It seems a bit unnecessary because nVidia has already neutered consumer cards for many/most data center purposes by not using ECC and by providing so few FP64 units that double precision FLOPS is barely better than CPU SIMD.
it’s also not really a thing anymore because of the open kernel driver… at that point it’s just MIT licensed.
of course people continued to melt down about that for some reason too, in the customary “nothing is ever libre enough!” circular firing squad. Just like streamline etc.
There’s a really shitty strain of fanboy thought that wants libre software to be actively worsened (even stonewalled by the kernel team if necessary) so that they can continue to argue against nvidia as a bad actor that doesn’t play nicely with open source. You saw it with all these things but especially with the open kernel driver, people were really happy it didn’t get upstreamed. Shitty behavior all around.
You see it every time someone quotes Linus Torvalds on the issue. Some slight from 2006 is more important than users having good, open drivers upstreamed. Some petty brand preferences are legitimately far important than working with and bringing that vendor into the fold long-term, for a large number of people. Most of whom don’t even consider themselves fanboys! They just say all the things a fanboy would say, and act all the ways a fanboy would act…
