[Fedora-legal-list] enabling CUDA support

[Milos Jakubicek]

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_Toolkit_EULA_081215.pdf
(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