Fair enough - it was quick cynicism - apologies for my quick reaction. Not really up to Hacker News standards. For some perspective, I've been around long enou

Fair enough - it was quick cynicism - apologies for my quick reaction. Not really up to Hacker News standards. For some perspective, I've been around long enough to have seen many many similar things before ... generally not for the better. I saw Google appear, and do very well, all the while acknowledging that their world is complex and their business had the potential for terrible consequences. Remember "Don't be Evil." That could have been enough - do great, useful, interesting stuff, and profit from it. But Google (like most of the others) has been subsumed by new managerialism and short-term goals. Search and Maps have both morphed and look more like low-end advertising directories. Android hasn't learnt much from Windows; is driven by "feature tick-boxism" and becomes more bloated and confused (for users and programmers) with each release. And short-term profit-driven decisions have written-off or endangered products like Reader, Drive, and Gmail. So when I see "Google" and "FPGA" I was primed for warning flags. And flags-a-plenty there are. I'm afraid I distrust the basic model: pick an open source tool (nextptr) and "extend" it (which locks users into the new tool). Create an "alliance", bundle, and add bits and pieces. It looks (deliberately or not) like an attempt to dominate an environment - reminds me of the Android development environment, and not in a good way.