You might be locked into a service by contract, as either a customer or a business. If that service is no longer available, it could prevent that business from doing business.
Personally I see this as an affront to everything the free market is supposed to stand for. It is also anti-consumer. It's corporate dictatorship; absolutely monopolistic tendencies. A company should never have post-sale control of merchandise it has already sold; allowing that opens up to all kinds of abusive opportunities.
What "rule" would that be? Makers of goods can't just make up arbitrary rules and expect everyone else to have to follow them, they're hardware manufacturers, not conquering dictators!
(Well, not yet...)
HW and firmware still has strict guidelines when it comes to international tech companies creating products for retail and also large business deployments, Nvidia are not the only ones that need to cater to different sales-support channels and can be storage manufacturers to network manufacturers.
So where does that leave those who have games they can no longer use due to GFWL or similar services?
Where does it leave those with games using pre Denuvo protection that no longer works due to XP/Win7 upgraded to Windows 10 and not supported?
Where does it leave Denuvo games that probably will not work with next OS?
Anyway I am surprised no-one sees the issue of bypassing the correct sales and support channels and the right partners who sell datacenter products.
But when you buy a HW product it does not include equal rights to the software/firmware, albeit it would be a grey area about using existing software/firmware provided with the HW in a way that was never intended from a business/service model perspective.
This has started to become more firm when one looks at digital games and applications, and does apply to firmware as well that has similar levels of Manufacturers' ownership/protection.
I need to read the EULA for Geforce but considering it was never intended for large businesses maybe it had some loopholes.
As I mentioned earlier, one is not meant to be able to buy a datacenter amount of Pascal Titans and so questions should be asked how Satora bypassed the mechanism in place to limit what they managed to do.
The downside is that Nvidia will now restrict Titans even more sigh, and especially the Titan V.
You may blame Nvidia but Sakora has a lot to answer for as well; what they attempted to do not only affects Nvidia but also their elite/preferred partners that deal with many of the larger professional requirements.
Well, no, I don't know anything about the hardware differentiations.
I'm posting because this thread talked about the EULA that was accompanying consumer cards, and pointing out that that, AFAIK, isn't legally enforceable. At any level, I don't think. If a big company wants to stack their data centre with Teslas, and then has a couple servers short and pops down the local PCWorld and gets a couple of Titans and slaps them in, if they work, how can they be policed, prevented, and/or prosecuted?
These will be nVidia's business arms serving business, but if a company wants to circumvent that and buy consumer level goods, they can. I don't know of any law anywhere that can prevent that (outside of contract law). If you want to produce Hollywood movies using consumer level video editors, ther's nothing to stop to. The reason pros use professional level software at professional prices is because the features aren't there at the consumer level. If you want to shoot a movie on a consumer level camcorder, you can. If you want to write the script in Notepad, you can. There's no method to limit how someone uses a product they own which is what I'm protesting at here, there apparent move to control users post sells, based on what's been posted.
Ordinarily a company would control use of consumer level products at the enterprise level by gimping it and limiting availability. If you need 1000 Titans, you can't bulk buy them from Amazon so would be forced to buy direct from nVidia at which point they are allowed to refuse to sell you the cheaper product.
Right. Sakura should be dealing with contracts for direct supply from nVidia which would control what they can and can't do via agreement.
Can you provide any example of where functionality or application of a software product is refused? I'm not talking licensing agreements as to who can use a piece of software, but where a piece of software states it cannot be used to create/support XYZ?
To be clear on my argument here, in case I've misunderstood what's happening, I understand that nVidia has included a license agreement with their consumer level cards saying they cannot be used in certain situations, trying to control how a product sold over the counter is used after that transaction has taken place. That's the only aspect I'm questioning the legality of. I can even recall clear evidence that you can't, when I learnt that those multibuy packs of Coke and junk food can be sold individually in stores. Even though the manufacturer labels them as 'nor for resale', they can't enforce that and have no say over what happens to the product once bought.
Your 1st point though is skewed, you cannot pop down to local PCWorld and buy a datacenter worth of Pascal Titans.
Try buying even a cluster for one project without involving Nvidia or a partner officially supported by Nvidia, Nvidia deliberately limited its availability or scope if buying a node and applies to Titan V and Pascal.
In essence Sakora broke Nvidia's rule of only
2 per customer that is clear on Nvidia/Geforce website, sure we could argue this is another grey area but shows Sakora has gone out of its way to bypass what Nvidia has put in place differentiating between Geforce/Quadro/Tesla from business and support-service channel model.
You can get more than 2 but requires specific use such as I mentioned earlier with
DL (and specific cases).
But my point and context is more than just the software EULA and also comes back to agreements from a business/purchase/project entity perspective.
Most international tech companies would be unimpressed with what Sakura has done; those companies that sell to retail and also has a sales&support partner channel designed for multi-million pound large scale projects/deployments.
That said Nvidia and their elite partners can make life difficult for Sakura when it comes to warranty/support and going forward.
And like I said AMD is placing differentiators that impacts many buying the Vega FE as a prosumer/small professional enterprise GPU rather than the WX9100 or MI25.
Maybe I am biased because I have spent my life working in such tech companies that have a similar structure to that of Nvidia when it comes to retail/professional/large projects and the relationship between the business (client)/sales&support channel-partners/manufacturer, but I see the need for such differentiation if one is to have a healthy ecosystem and continued product growth and evolution (R&D).
However my context is not small businesses/individuals but ones such as Sakora and larger, which is what kicked off Nvidia's response.
This is not about consumers but business entities such as Sakora pushing the boundaries.
If this went on unchecked consider the impact down the line when such datacenters start to pop up in China/some other countries and cutting cost/channels that support the broad ecosystem worldwide....
Although the other impact is probably even stricter control of Titan sales sigh (and I blame Sakura more for this than Nvidia).
Edit:
Bolded a bit to emphasise the differentiation and intended scope beyond buying 2 per customer.
