[Fedora-legal-list] enabling CUDA support
Hi all,
I've following bugreport from a BOINC user:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=487981
Basically, CUDA is a Nvidia technology which enables the GPU to be used
for various complex scientific computations (which are then even faster
than on CPU).
I was about to close the bug as WONTFIX as the whole CUDA is not open
source, but then I found out that BOINC (which recently added support
for CUDA applications) needs only the single libcudart.so library and
that this prebuilt library coming from Nvidia has been already included
in the source tarball (but not packaged as far).
Now I have a question: as it principally enables the hardware to be
controlled by some end-user applications, would it be possible to ship
the libcudart.so library in a subpackage as "Redistributable, no
modification permitted" like a firmware?
Actually this is what the Nvidia's EULA is saying about the Linux part
of CUDA:
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/2_1/toolkit/CUDA_Toolki...
(see section 2.1.3)
Although I guess we can't do it in this way (I'm afraid that same
arguments could then be used for e.g. all closed-source modules), I
rather ask before definitely closing the bugreport.
Regards,
Milos