License Issue about Distributing NVIDIA's cuDNN library via Debian

[Luke Yeager]

Adding Maitreyi, who is the Product Manager for cuDNN.

-----Original Message-----
From: lumin [mailto:cdluminate at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 23, 2017 11:43 PM
To: debian-legal at lists.debian.org
Cc: pkg-nvidia-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org; Daniel Stender; Luke Yeager; 862524 at bugs.debian.org
Subject: License Issue about Distributing NVIDIA's cuDNN library via Debian

Hi Debian Legal Team,

I intend to package[1] a proprietary deep learning library named "cuDNN"[2], which is definitely useful to deep learning researchers.

@lyeager kindly provided some help[3] on this but I'm not really good at these legal terms.

Generally, to download the cudnn library, one needs to fist register or login at nvidia's website. Next, the user is required to click "I agree ..."[4] to continue.
Now the secured library download link is exposed to the user.[5]

Initially I don't think such a well-protected proprietary can be distributed by Debian, untill I find this package in Archlinux's community repo[6].

I don't know how the Arch guys achieved this but in their PKGBUILD file (arch packaging script) there is a anonymously downloadable link to the cudnn library[7]. What is notable is the "redist" keyword in the URL. I can't find this "redist"
URL in nvidia's website.

I'm confused.

What makes me more confused is nvidia legal guy's word conveyed by @lyeager [8]. Once a package is uploaded to the Archive, isn't the distributor (legally) the Debian Organization? It's so weird for an individual to take the role of distributor for a package in Archive and I think it's impossible.

Anyway I'm not good at the legal field. I need help.

Thank you in advance :-)

P.S. "cuDNN", i.e. "CUDA Deep Neural Network", is a library built upon nvidia's proprietary CUDA toolkit, which was available in our archive for years[9].

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/862524
[2] https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn
[3] https://github.com/CDLuminate/nvidia-cudnn/issues/1
[4] Unluckily this licence file is secured, only available after login:
http://developer2.download.nvidia.com/compute/machine-
learning/cudnn/secure/v6/prod/Doc/NVIDIA_SLA%2BcuDNN_Supp_Feb2017_relea
se.pdf
[5] https://developer.nvidia.com/compute/machine-learning/cudnn/secure/
v6/prod/8.0_20170427/cudnn-8.0-linux-x64-v6.0-tgz
[6] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/cudnn/
[7] http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/redist/cudnn/v6.0/cudn
n-8.0-linux-x64-v6.0.tgz
[8] https://github.com/CDLuminate/nvidia-cudnn/issues/1#issuecomment-30
1827809
[9] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-cuda-toolkit

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