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by ewgfdgdfgdf 748 days ago
CUDA is a technology investment that gives Nvidia a moat, but there is nothing exclusionary about it, Nvidia invested in tooling years ago ... it will just take time for others to catch up.
1 comments

NVDA banned CUDA translations layers, that's pretty exclusionary because it denies interoperability. There was already a discussion about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39592689
Well, they tried to legally prohibit it, but as people in that thread pointed out, it's legally irrelevant in most developed countries ... so another hardware maker can fund a (legally) independent team in say France (most favorable reverse engineering laws) to break it / copy it / do whatever they like ... and then open source the output for the rest of the world.

It's even dubiously legal in the US ... but there it would be a war of legal fund attrition and Nvidia has deep pockets.

Still - break it in France, give it away ... US laws go poof.

It's really just the ongoing development of the software ecosystem that gives them their moat ... but it's a good technical moat because they steer future dev and others play catch up.

Actually good points. I just hope other players catch up.