Uggghhh. Thankfully, I’ve never even heard of this program, but this sets a poor precedent for their future endeavors
Read the entire article, despite not having heard about Vivado previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if a certain company ending in
softslop is somehow involved.The thing that makes sense to me (purely speculative, no real info to back this) is that Microslop isn’t happy about losing money and the user base, so they are pushing their hardware partners to force users back to the platform.
Redis did exactly this back in March 2024, dropping its long-standing BSD license for the more restrictive dual licensing model, and the blowback was severe enough that the community forked it into Valkey almost immediately.
Sounds like this is probably the best approach and outcome for the Vivado community and software. The end of the article recommends either joining in the discussion on AMD’s forums (which only seems to be getting stonewalled) or joining the growing number of people on hacker news.
That’s the second-best approach. The best approach is for it to be copyleft instead of permissively-licensed to begin with.
I don’t disagree, I meant given the current situation. Obviously copyleft would be preferred and should be encouraged.
For your specific question: Why is Linux not supported in the BASIC tier?
This is AMD’s marketing decision.
Kind Regards, Anatoli Curran, Xilinx/AMD Forum Moderator
Translation, we looked at the books and thought this could make us more money.
I honestly think this is it, and it’s not arbitrary. I think it’s because really any build server will be running Linux (either natively or via Docker). AMD/Xilinx probably thinks “Build Servers are an advanced use case, so not covered under the free license”
I don’t know the exact reason but yeah. “Marketing” departments don’t get to just make fundamental product decisions in any company I’ve ever interacted with.
Dealing with this kind of shit was one of the reasons we completely dropped xilinx. Apart from that they were very unhelpful and unfriendly.
What do you mean by this kind of shit? I am in the FPGA space for quite some time now but I don’t think something like this happened before. When did you leave and what are you using now? I agree with you on the support. If there isn’t an (unpaid) member in the community forum or on some other platform you are pretty much fucked. I never used another vendor, so I can’t say if it is different there though.
Xilinx has turned asshole against us, because their reseller misreported numbers. Our boss was fuming after the conference and told me to find another vendor.
We are now using Efinix chips and their forum and direct support is wonderful. I had discussions with their tool developers about UI design decisions that actually led to improvements. Imagine trying to get something like that done with Xilinx - they have grown too big to care unless you buy millions of chips.
Nice, seems like it was a good decisions. Do you miss anything from the Xilinx world?
The free simulator.
What do you use instead ? As a student, the new prices are completely unaffordable, and I am not going to use Windows 😓
We switched the whole line to Efinix. One disadvantage though: They don’t supply a simulator.
As someone who had the misfortune to work with Vivado before. I really hope that this might drive a new company/independent dev team to make something better and we get something good out of this.
I mean it is a huge loss for FOSS since it is one of the only “IDEs” (* if you can even call this buggy bullshit that*) that is free. But it really is shit.
I really liked Verilog but I could never work with it for longer than an hour before some new Vivado bug needed a restart or I got sick from interacting with the interface.
OP is clickbaiting FUD again. Classic.
Can you explain?
As far as I can see OP took the original article headline verbatim; the article itself does describe the exact kind of bait-and-switch model as I’ve heard it used: company offers open standard edition, after a while switches it to basic / ‘core’ offering which locks e.g. Linux access behind a (steep) paywall.
Read the comments at https://lemy.lol/post/66119615
You’ll have to point me even closer because none of the comments I have seen on that post state what happened is different than what I described above?
I can see a comment stating the switch is justified in their eyes, but it doesn’t negate that it is a bait-and-switch model.
Wish I had time. If you care to dive in, I’ve provided a link to the post. If you don’t believe any of the comments fit, then I guess you don’t agree with the comments, and thats fine.
Not a single one of those comments gives the clarity that you see to think that it does. There were two comments that seemed to support removing Linux from the free tier because… ? No real reason was given, even by these vague supporters as to why it should be free for Windows and not Linux.
K
The term “bait and switch” has a widely accepted meaning, and this scenario meets the requirements of that definition.
It seems to me that you have some sort of affinity for AMD that causes you to bristle at critiques of the company, but the facts are uncomfortable ones and very plain to see.
Consider that publicly traded companies have no allegiances. Aligning yourself with them makes you a free marketing tool.
K
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