Of course, a cleanroom procedure is a given in this case. History has shown that it is entirely possible though - see ReactOS for one very public example.

But also, not everyone cares. See game modders who routinely use source code leaks to make game patches. I'm not talking about big companies that want nvidia would want to sue, but individuals and small groups, who are not a big enough target and would likely remain anonymous anyways.

ReactOS isn't necessarily the best example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341933

That thread goes on to describe several very plausible reasons that a clean room implementation could have resulted in all of the coincidences the commenter pointed out.

Developers of the open source nouveau driver for nvidia GPUs certainly won't:

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961

I honestly don’t care about nouveau. It’s a fine project, but as a user I know it as the preinstalled software that cripples my servers until I install the proprietary drivers.

If nvidia releases the drivers as source-available rather than open source that would still be incredibly useful since you can distribute patches. Their drivers are still missing basic features like fan speed control on headless machines.

In my experience nouveau was way better than the proprietary drivers, which would crash a lot, while nouveau was stable. This was long ago though, maybe nvidia are better now.

I don't think you can distribute patches against proprietary source-available drivers, since modifying proprietary code is against copyright law.

Did you leave power savings enabled? Cause that’s a recipe for disaster on Linux. My ML servers have years of uptime with “nvidia-smi -pm 0” in crontab and auto updates disabled. The latter prevents the CUDA version from getting ahead of the kernel module version.

It’s a polished turd, but at least it works which is more than I can say for nouveau

And yes you can distribute patches. Copyright only prevents you from distributing the modified version.

This was like 15 years ago (no idea about power savings stuff), I wouldn't touch the proprietary driver any more though.

nouveau has been extremely stable for me when I used it up until last year.

Patches contain parts of the original code, so I would class them as modified versions of the original code. Also the initial modification isn't allowed either, I wasn't really referring to distribution of the patches, just creating them isn't allowed AFAIK.

You’re talking about the EULA, not the copyright license. The EULA can certainly claim you’re not allowed to do that, but it’s also unenforceable in most places so who cares?

I'm talking about neither the EULA nor the copyright license, but about copyright law, which doesn't allow modifications by default. Only a EULA or other license can then allow modifications.

OTOH, even the GPL is pretty much unenforceable these days, unless you are well funded enough to afford time consuming legal cases.

<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Galoob_Toys,_Inc._v._N...>

Of course they will review it in their spare time. They wouldn’t copy it, but they could certainly learn insights and apply them in their architectures.

No, they won't. Any competitors and any open-source projects will advise their engineers to stay as far away from it as possible.

It's a clean-room engineering situation, if you've even looked at it you're legally contaminated and you're now a liability to the parent company/project's IP. And now those projects have to be hyper-aware of any contributors who might "sneak in" a bit of NVIDIA code that gets the whole project taken down.

https://nitter.eu/_Lyude/status/1498811646697000961