Very few professional artists refuse using Photoshop or After Effects because it will "contribute to Adobe's monopoly".

But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard.

I think because professional artists can’t typically make their software tools. Whereas engineers could in theory make their own tools. Naturally few do in practice though as tech has become far too large and specialized. But our roots are where our values and ideals come from.

That is a really theoretical point.

If I start to work on a tool, then I cannot work anymore on what I actually wanted to do. And it just so happens ... that this is exactly what I did and I can just say, it usually takes way longer than the most pessimistic estimate one can come up with, so yes, one can decide to switch careers and try to get funding to (re)build what is not offered to acceptable conditions (but in my case the tool simply did not exist, though).

Just like an artist can switch career, study CS, build on his own a tool a professional company build with a team over years - and then someday work with his tool to acomplish his original work. In (simplified) theories, lots of things are possible ..

> But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard

Not in the real world. Most programmers who are trying to get a job done won’t avoid CUDA or AWS or other tools just to avoid “contributing to a monopoly”. When responsible programmers have a job to do and tools are available to help with the job, they get used.

A programmer who avoids mainstream tools on principle is liable to get surpassed by their peers very quickly. I’ve only met a few people like this in industry and they didn’t last very long trying to do everything the hard way just to avoid tools from corporations or monopolies or open source that wasn’t pure enough for their standards.

It’s only really in internet comment sections that people push ideological purity like this.

The same attitude brought us adaptation of linux. So IDK

Most lottery tickets aren't winners.

Tool choice of artists has close to 0 impact on people interacting with final work. Choices made by programmers are amplified through the users of produced software.

> But for some reasons professional programmers are judged under a much higher moral standard.

I believe the key word there is "professional" -- one of the challenges of a venue like HN is the professional engineers and the less-professional ones interact from worldviews and use cases so distinct that they may as well be separate universes. In other spaces, we wouldn't let a top doctor have to explain very basic concepts about the commercial practice of medicine to an amateur "skeptic" and yet so many discussions on HN degenerate along just these lines.

On the other hand, it's that very same inclusiveness and generally high discourse in spite of that wide expanse which make HN such a special community, so I'm not sure what to conclude besides this unfortunate characteristic being a necessary "feature, not a bug" of the community. There's no way around it that wouldn't make the community a lesser place, I think.

And they ended up with Creative Cloud bloatware.

It isn't the consumer's responsibility to regulate the market.

And, in this case NVIDIA earned it. They built a very useful software layer around their chips.

Then whose responsibility is it? Corporations? The government? Or maybe the tooth fairy?

That is a weak argument that could be used to justify tons of behavior, very convenient.

Vote with your feet. Maybe you can't or can't afford it, then at least admit the problem to yourself and maybe don't try to persuade others in order to feel better for your own decision.

If consumers don't care about their money, then who would?

Eh, CUDA can mostly be transformed to HIP, unless you use specialized NVIDIA stuff.

Is there something that is not vendor specific? Maybe a parallel programming language that compiles to different targets?

..and doesn't suck.

The part that I don't understand is why AMD/Intel/somebody else don't just implement at least the base CUDA for their products.

HIP is basically that, but they still make you jump through hoops to rename everything etc.

There are libraries written at a lower level that wouldn't be immediately portable, but surely that could be addressed over time as well.

So sayeth the person who has never written OpenCL.

I'm with you, and am surprised there isn't comparable competition.