Wrong license information for NVidia proprietary driver

[Alexander E. Patrakov]

When I attempted to download NVidia drivers (specifically, version 384.98) from the official website for a non-Ubuntu system, I got this license:

http://www.nvidia.com/content/DriverDownload-March2009/licence.php?lang=us&type=GeForce

Note specifically:

"""
No Datacenter Deployment. The SOFTWARE is not licensed for datacenter deployment, except that blockchain processing in a datacenter is permitted.

"""

This clause is not present in a license for Tesla GPUs, but I don't have a Tesla. And my application is not related to blockchain, either.

And then I remembered that I have an Ubuntu server in Hetzner with a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. The copyright file in the package does not have this "No Datacenter Deployment" clause. Is it because Ubuntu has somehow negotiated the exception, because the file in the package is incomplete, or because there was no such restriction yet in version 384.90?

But the same license shows up on NVidia site even if I attempt to manually download the older version - did they change it retroactively?

In other words - should I shut down the server because my use violates the NVidia license?

If possible, please package separately the last version of the NVidia driver that does not have any restrictions on its use in datacenters, because many of them still only provide (now-illegal) GeForce GPUs.

# apt-cache policy nvidia-384
nvidia-384:
  Installed: 384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
  Candidate: 384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
  Version table:
 *** 384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.2 500
        500 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/restricted amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 500
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/restricted amd64 Packages

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: nvidia-384 384.90-0ubuntu0.16.04.2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-17.20~16.04.1-generic 4.13.8
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-17-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.13
Architecture: amd64
Date: Mon Dec 25 14:28:11 2017
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nvidia-graphics-drivers-384
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)