From my own experience Altera floods education/research facilities with free-or-cheap developement boards and tools compared to Xilinx. Much like Atmel or Micro

From my own experience Altera floods education/research facilities with free-or-cheap developement boards and tools compared to Xilinx. Much like Atmel or Microsoft itself. Microsoft already has large programs to grow users for their software and Altera is more suitable in this regard.