I think you have an excellent point. Why bother with a company if they sick their lawyers on hobbyists and experimenters? With CPU's the modern software engin

I think you have an excellent point. Why bother with a company if they sick their lawyers on hobbyists and experimenters? With CPU's the modern software engineer expects a new GCC/LLVM target, so we can have a consistent experience with one code base. I get that. I believe the market is shifting under the FPGA's faster than they realize. Sure they're going to have large corporate customers for a while using the xilinx proprietary IP cores, etc. But someone at some company is going to get a bonus for saving the company tons of money by modifying an open source core, so they can drop the cost of using the xilinx proprietary cores.