Get permission from Nvidia to redistribute drivers directly?

[smcv]

At the moment, this driver uses Flatpak's "extra data" mechanism, which stops working if Nvidia stops hosting a particular driver (for example flatpak/flatpak#4810), and can be unnecessarily slow if the user's connection to Nvidia's servers is worse than their connection to Flathub (or a mirror of Flathub).

A better scenario for these drivers would be if the maintainers of this driver bundle, or even Nvidia themselves, could upload the driver to Flathub as an ordinary Flatpak extension, the same way Mesa works.

A while ago I put some people from Flathub in contact with developers in Nvidia, in the hope that they could negotiate a way to get permission to redistribute the Nvidia drivers through Flathub without using "extra data". For example, Debian got similar permission 20 years ago so that they could ship the drivers in a .deb. Did anything ever come out of that?

[MasterKia]

Another problem is that the Nvidia download website shows a 403 error to users with Iranian IPs so those users are effectively left without Nvidia Flatpak updates.

> flatpak update
Looking for updates…

        ID                                                     Branch            Op            Remote             Download
 1. [✗] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-390-144             1.4               u             flathub            1.0 kB / 50.9 MB

Warning: While downloading https://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/390.144/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.144-no-compat32.run: Server returned status 403: Forbidden
Updates complete.

[404NetworkError]

See #167

[TingPing]

Did anything ever come out of that?

An engineer did reach out and the EULA was even updated to be more clear for our usage.

We just need somebody to update the package as I no longer use nvidia.