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It does seem to some extend the higher the level of abstraction, the more potential for inappropriate controls or restrictions. More restrictions exist in apps

It does seem to some extend the higher the level of abstraction, the more potential for inappropriate controls or restrictions. More restrictions exist in apps vs OS vs cpu, or in cloud services like gdrive vs an EBS volume on AWS. So FPGAs are at least a step closer to free (or harder to secure). Even if they are under control of the manufacturer, there is a lot more flexibility and less potential for "oversight" at the gate level. There is still the question of all the peripherals, I'd be worried about internet and video and other i/o adapters only being compatible with proprietary hardware, and impossible to use with a home programmed fpga

foxfluff 5y ago
Depending on what your performance target is, you might do without adapters. Low speed USB can be bitbanged even with 8-bit attiny. RP2040 with PIO can run DVI, 720p@30Hz (though you do need to overclock the chip heavily). I don't know how to implement Ethernet with digital logic (it uses pulse amplitude modulation) but bandwidth-wise it's not too challenging. Gigabit signals to PHY are 125MHz using RGMII. I think 100Mbit Ethernet would use 25MHz but I'm not actually sure. All doable using commodity microcontrollers without an FPGA. I could see a long road to a dystopia where these legacy protocols are deprecated and they push out devices that only speak new protocols that won't let unapproved devices talk.. but I'm not that pessimistic. I can't see the copyright mafia chasing things down so far, and they'd rail up against all the industrial users.