Just allow me to doubt that one (1) programmer is all AMD would need to close up the software gap to NVIDIA...

Are you suggesting that CUDA is the entirety of the "software gap", because it's a lot more than that. That seems like a strawman argument.

Andrzej Janik.

Starter at Intel working on it, they passed because there was no business there.

AMD picked it up and funded it from 2022. They stopped in 2024, but his contract allowed the release of the software in such an event.

Now it's ZLUDA.

Surely they could hire some good lawyers if that means they make billions upon billions? AFAIK there's nothing illegal about creating compatibility layers. Otherwise WINE would have shut down long ago.

Depends on what code they wrote. If they used LLMs to write it, it could contain proprietary nvidia parts. Someone would then have to review that, but can't, because maybe the nvidia code that came from the LLM isn't even public.

So the strategy to publish independently, wait and see if nvidia lawyers have anything to say about it, would be a very smart move.

The Oracle case was about the stubs of the API being considered copyrighted I believe. The argument wasn't that Google used any of their code, it was that by using the same functional names they were making a thought crime.

The last time something similar happened (Google vs Oracle), the legal battles lasted more than a decade. It would be a very bold decision by ARM to commit to this strategy (implement "CUDA" and fight it out in courts).

That means Google got to use Java for a decade. A decade-long legal battle is great news for whoever seems to be in the wrong, as long as they can still afford lawyers. Remember, they don't claw back dividends or anything.