alt Hacker NewsFolks feel outrage when companies start charging for things that were once free.
Okay, but what if you run a company whose business model no longer supports giving away free stuff? How can you transition? What would users consider less outrageous?
Replies
Basic Vivado is the bare minimum to develop for their hardware. A large amount of functionality is still locked away behind paid IP.
Most of the revenue comes from the IP cores.
A common business model for companies like this is to enable developers to learn their tools cheaply, so that when they develop something for their employer, they're more likely to reach for those tools/ecosystems and have the employer pay for those tools.
This just cuts out beginner/hobbyist FPGA devs from using industry standard tooling.
It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.
You need to buy their hardware to use it. In fact there is no way to use most of their hardware without Vivado. So it's more like they are blocking you from using things you've already paid for
The software is useless without their chips and the chips cost a fortune. It's not "business model no longer supports giving away free stuff". It's just bean-counters cutting corners.
AMD isn't giving away free stuff. They are selling FPGA hardware. But further, the free stuff has a lot of restrictions around it which practically gear it only for university usage. And the reason they do that is they want to have new graduates have experience with their software so they can demand it from their future employers.