Yeah any reverse engineering of closed source code takes time. It's a huge job on its own. Adding the need to avoid actions that may lead to legal issues.

Well yep, It's very likely this may never round to a perfect replacement product.

But it still has value. For starters, it will encourage new open source projects to use it rather than the propria try version, long before it's a direct replacement capable product.

So the effort is worth some excitement. At least a pat on the back and free beer for some of the guys trying.

Hopefully they have better defenses against legal action from Nvidia than ZLUDA did.

In the past, re-implementing APIs has been deemed fair use in court (for example, Oracle v Google a few years back). I'm not entirely sure why ZLUDA was taken down; maybe just to avoid the trouble of a legal battle, even if they could win. I'm not a lawyer so I can only guess.

Validity aside, I expect Nvidia will try to throw their weight around.

Yeah that’s not coming https://github.com/mikex86/LibreCuda/issues/1