Nvidia gets in tizz over driver distribution

THE WIBBLE IS in a wobble today over a cease and desist letter sent by flacks at Green Team HQ to community website NGOHQ.

The folks at NGOHQ, which is based in Israel, have a habit of taking the latest ForceWare releases, modifying the .INF files to add in support for older Nvidia cards and then re-distributing them.

A spokesman for the site, 'Regeneration', accused Nvidia of "psychological warfare" on its customers by removing older product support from the .INF files of new drivers, effectively forcing upgrades.

By adding back in product strings to the file, 'Regeneration' suggests he is doing the community a favour, putting the 'Unified' back into 'Driver Architecture', Graphzilla's favourite term for describing its one-size-fits-most driver downloads.

It doesn't help that the letter, sent by spinner extraordinaire Bryan 'Delboy' Del Rizzo quotes US copyright law at the website, which any legal eagle at the firm could have told him doesn't apply in Israel.

However, after taking a fairly moderate tone for the first few paragraphs of its public response to the firm, NGOHQ then goes on to threaten Nvidia with Department of Justice filings, antitrust, abuse, harrassment and discrimination, all of which appears to cultimate in the 'Why us and not anyone else' defence, which is weak at the best of times.

Has Nvidia shot itself in the foot with this one? Or is it protecting its customers by preventing modified drivers from snaring users too dull to tell the difference? We're not sure, but we're pretty certain that DAAMIT will be making hay right now. µ