9 ms·
AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo agoIt's long been said: "AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance." In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.
- fer 5mo agoI'm even surprised they have so much of the console market
- Novosell 5mo agoI imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor. If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia. A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?
- wongarsu 5mo agoAMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a couple hardware configurations, making it viable to take advantage of such hardware features
- theresistor 5mo agoAlso also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it. Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.
- bee_rider 5mo agoAnd they’ve been in a rough spot at various times in the past, which probably made them willing to negotiate with the console companies. Actually looking at this thread, there’s a lot of good reasons they were the go-tos for consoles. Consoles seem to be in rough shape at the moment, I wonder if part of that is that AMD has been doing too well since Zen, haha.
- philistine 5mo agoYou’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions. Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.
- genxy 5mo agoNvidia was so thirsty for an x86 license, for years, that it wouldn't consider anything else.
- spider-mario 5mo agoShould be the first of the two chances for the phrase to work.
- SSLy 5mo agoespecially their marketing dept which made this decision seems to be run by absolute buffoons
- b3lvedere 5mo agoI bet this decision was made by showing an Excel sheet.
- SecretDreams 5mo agoAMD has long been the proof that hardware is easier than software. Apparently, hardware is also easier than marketing.
- amelius 5mo agoI wish more software engineers found out how easy hardware actually is.
- sph 5mo agoGiven how many idiotic ideas are ‘patched’ or worked around in software, it’s probably pretty easy. Especially in the world of modern GPUs when only a handful of people at the factory are able to write drivers for it. Hardware vendors lost the plot in the Winmodem era.
- tardedmeme 5mo agoWinmodems are a very sensible idea. You know software-defined radio? They are that, but for modems. Expandable to support any current or future protocol, at the cost of CPU time. Why do we like SDRs but hate SDMs? That's an irrational position. The actual problem with winmodems was them breaking the established software/hardware boundary, and the Linux community not having the resources to follow suit. Nothing stops someone from taking the free Windows Vivado and making it run on Linux, or taking a Winmodem driver and making it run on Linux, or writing a from-scratch software implementation of a 56k modem that can run on any sound card plugged into a phone line (which is what a Winmodem is), or reverse engineering the bitstream format for these FPGAs and writing a compiler from scratch (or even just the device-dependent backend - the frontend and middle-end can be developed in a more normal way and can be shared with other toolchains). But nobody actually stepped up and did it, which I think is proof that the free software community is a lot weaker than it thinks it is. You could even do it right now, if you wanted to. You're not, and I'm sure there are good reasons for that. Extrapolate it across all developers, and it's unfortunate that it seems none of them have enough reason to do it. On the flip side, if anyone reading this does suddenly decide they have enough reason to do it... (Incentive: FPGAs are fun to play with!)
- altairprime 5mo agoNon-paying users aren’t customers, though, so they must view all this outrage seems irrelevant. Which suggests that they view free-tier Linux users as significantly less likely to ever pay for its use. That matches my understanding of the (non-Steam) Linux as a miserly and demanding target market, so I don’t really fault them for the choice — especially given how brutally expensive it is to support the IDIC of Miscellaneous Linuxes. Kind of surprised they haven’t just withdrawn free support for anything but Steam Linux, in order to lower their costs (and to produce a ‘free’ build that anyone can run privately but doesn’t interop at all with enterprise). Maybe they want it to be a ‘shareware trial’ for enterprise? Or perhaps they just haven’t thought of it yet.
- fsh 5mo agoVivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.
- altairprime 5mo agoHardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fuck up the hardware undercut, but if you can get away with it, subscriptions are certainly a valid answer to maintenance of the platform over time. I still think they didn’t go far enough to make a meaningful dent in conversions from free to paying, though. (Note that mention of Steam Linux is not about the games aspect, but about the Valve’s seeming plans to become a competitive target for Linux support to the exclusion of other consumer-focused miscellaneity. But I tend to go on about this too often, and shouldn’t have invoked it here, apologies.)
- awjlogan 5mo agoThis is not the case here as the software is required to use the hardware they’re selling at any quantity. The software is cost entirely for them, if you’re not buying the hardware you’re not using the software. Given they support Linux for the paid version, its development is already paid for. Absolutely say you won’t provide support for free tier users. Today’s free tier users are tomorrow’s purchasing managers. FPGA is not a big market, so you have to capture comparatively few people for each unit of market share. Good silicon without good software is just very expensive sand.
- subscribed 5mo agoThey're quite brilliant with their NICs though.
- azalemeth 5mo agoI have specifically chosen AMD _many_ times in the past precisely because of their better linux support and more open toolchain. This is an absolute foot-gun moment. And the gaslighting PR responses are just unacceptable. I'm very disappointed in them.
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo agoNvidia supports their cards for many years - even quite old cards often have modern drivers. AMD just does not see the world this way.
- bigfatkitten 5mo agoThis is about their FPGA tooling. It has nothing whatsoever to do with GPUs.
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo agoSo? I'm making a true observation about the companies. I am well aware this is about FPGA and that has nothing to do with my comment.
- KeplerBoy 5mo agoIt is completely different. FPGA tooling is not the same as a driver for a consumer product. A lot of the serious CUDA compute stuff is also not supported on all platforms (it's linux only, because why would you do such stuff on windows).
- AbstractPlay 5mo agoYour "true observation" doesn't contribute to the context of this particular topic thread which "has nothing to do with [your] comment", as you are "well aware". You should review the HN Guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kokada 5mo ago
- bravetraveler 5mo agoIncredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoThey want their *own* CUDA situation. if you're doing FPGA stuff, the Xilinx hardware is good and Vivaldi is really the only way to use it. AFAIK the open-source fpga situation is pretty far behind it (please correct me if I'm wrong, I work in a place that uses Xilinx FPGAs)
- bravetraveler 5mo ago> They want their *own* CUDA situation What better way to do that than decrease availability, I ask, both rhetorically and sarcastically! CUDA-proper did well, at least partially, because it was put in front of everyone. This is taking an exclusivity angle that doesn't make much sense for ecosystem development, IMO. I suspect this goes to show how much influence/priority B2B carries, my point is it's a mistake they've made before. The maintenance/support costs I believe they're trying to remove have paid dividends for CUDA and countless others. Anyway, a play on the tagline before I go: "Together we advance... licensing and removal of [positive] feedback loops over product development"
- nekusar 5mo agoI seriously think the CUDA situation was set up intentionally. Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) is related to Lisa Su (AMD CEO). A decade ago, I saw a demo of some AMD skunkworks GPU datacenter tech, that could execute CUDA natively on AMD/ATI graphics cards. Initially was half speed, but having the flexibility was crazy amazing. Created a big buzz in the big iron and educational markets. Where'd it go? Buried. You cant even find articles about it. Its a few comments on edtech datacenters. Now look at AMD's graphics line. Where's their ROCm LLM tooling? It's a fucking joke. Its like they're intentionally sinking it for her Nvidia uncle Huang. And Su takes the cheaper CPU market and offers better features than Intel.
- JCTheDenthog 5mo ago
- donohoe 5mo agoDiscussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
- officialchicken 5mo agoAdvanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
- LorenDB 5mo agoFound the UserBenchmark alt!
- zx8080 5mo ago> Starting with the 2026.1 release Don't upgrade. It's just that simple. Do they offer some unique features in the new version or is it a habit to upgrade everything every day?
- fer 5mo agoYes, working with recent distros. At some point I spun up a vm because there was no way to make it work after an upgrade.
- 15155 5mo agoQoR for advanced and large designs can change wildly between versions (for better or worse.)
- IshKebab 5mo agoRead the article. The old version will not be supported soon. I assume that means you also won't be able to register it.
- 15155 5mo agoPeople are still using Vivado 2019 (and earlier) and ISE. The ability to use these versions isn't going anywhere.
- ginko 5mo agoWhen AMD bought Xilinx I was hoping they'd open up the software side like they (eventually) did with their GPU drivers. Looks like that isn't happening anytime soon. It seems silly to put up SW barriers for people to use your fairly expensive HW, but what do I know.
- rob_c 5mo agoBut you just showed you have deep pockets and they think they can get you to open it again every year for the rest of time. Xilinx was never positioned that it made sense for them to open it up. If/when it gets run into the ground by AMD short sightedness they might just open it to claim that was the plan all along...
- dgacmu 5mo agoLarge company again makes local decision without considering the effects outside that single product line. I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.
- ginko 5mo ago>I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them. Not many I would guess.
- weaksauce 5mo agoconsidering nvidia has garbage gpu drivers in linux land and amd has pretty good ones i suspect you’re correct.
- Jean-Papoulos 5mo agoVery few, entreprise users (aka volume) will pay the license, hobbyists will pirate it if need be. AMD doesn't want to do support for the hobbyists for free, that's all.
- ekidd 5mo agoI mean, over the years, I have purchased (or advised other people to purchase) multiple Nvidia GPUs for compute workloads. And the reason pretty much always came down to good integration between various open source software and proprietary CUDA drivers. And the assumption is that this support will continue for many years. So, yeah, burning their existing FPGA users is a strong signal never to invest real money in their GPUs for compute workloads.
- rvz 5mo agoEarlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309 Also this site (itsfoss.com) is unusable and riddled with hundreds of ads and sets my machines fans to full blast. At least use another credible source or go to the source instead as per the HN guidelines.
- tux3 5mo agoThe rumor on the FPGA reddit is that they're going to walk it back. Quote: 'The only source I can give at this time is "trust me bro"'
- mindcrime 5mo agoHot Aisle on Twitter say they heard it directly from AMD, but I haven't seen any kind of public announcement yet. https://twitter.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317 https://twitter.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317
- Meneth 5mo agoThat's what you get for using unfree software.
- lefra 5mo agoThere's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
- rob_c 5mo agoI'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings
- tliltocatl 5mo agoXilinx has the best silicon. Everyone else is behind. Altera is basically dead thanks Intel. Lattice is nice for low power but performance-wise they are behind. Don't know much about Microchip, but from the little I've heard their tooling is a disaster even by the standards of FPGA tooling. Then there are Gowin (not bad, but Chinglish docs and everything), Gatemate (pretty innovative and vendor-backed nextpnr support - but only one low-mid FPGA with a promise to release chiplet assemblies of it latter). And Effinix - don't know much about them, do anyone have experience?
- IshKebab 5mo agoIt's not. There's a duopoly between AMD (Xilinx) and Intel (Altera). There's more choice at the very low end but if you're going for a powerful FPGA (which is mostly what people need) those are the choices.
- 15155 5mo agoThis isn't why there are no free alternatives: there are for 7 Series chips. Free alternatives have terrible QoR.
- linuxftw 5mo agoThis software seems to never have been open source/freely licensed. That's not a bait and switch. They were giving you a commercial product, for free, and now have decided not to. It's likely a case where maintaining separate builds for the free and commercial tiers was getting complex. Often times, this kind of software requires lots of manual reviewing and adding or removing modules, and they probably decided it's just not worth it.
- techcode 5mo agoI don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when: 1) They continue to have a free version for Windows 2) They continue to have a version for Linux I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?
- rob_c 5mo agoThink academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo). And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.
- blackguardx 5mo agoXilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).
- techcode 5mo agoAgain that reasoning falls apart because they offer free Windows version. So basically those academic/small companies are incentivised to switch to Windows (or use Wine/Proton) to use this software? And that's aside the fact that if support cases are the actual issue - they could (and probably already do that) just not allow free users to open/submit bug/support cases.
- 5mo ago
- cozzyd 5mo agoI mean perhaps the silver lining is the projects I use are all stuck on 2022.1 for now. I wonder if this is because they want to gate usage by AI agents.
- Hnrobert42 5mo agoFolks 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?
- eecc 5mo agoIt’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.
- perlgeek 5mo agoEven more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux. So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?
- adamas 5mo agoAnd not because Linux is more buggy but because Linux is populated with people that tend to know how to make bug reports ?
- Hnrobert42 5mo agoWhat argument?
- MSFT_Edging 5mo agoBasic 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.
- 5mo ago
- boomskats 5mo agoPretty sure this 'article' was written by an LLM, having scraped the HN discussion on here from 4 days ago. Nothing new there apart from a clickbait title and a ton of ads. Link to my comment, so that I don't repeat myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256417
- pjmlp 5mo agoAlways think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.
- lvl155 5mo agoAMD is not a good company. They stopped innovating after Intel was put down. Except, now Intel has govt backing while AMD will face significantly more competition from not only x86 but arm. Stock price says otherwise but I think they had more than enough time to catch up to Nvidia and simply refused to compete.
- adapteva 5mo agoExactly why we zero asic is making Platypus devices open bitstream and all tooling foss from day one...to protect the world against future evil/dumb version of ourselves. https://www.zeroasic.com/platypus https://www.zeroasic.com/platypus https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/wildebeest https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/wildebeest https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/logik https://www.zeroasic.com/projects/logik Of course we don't have silicon yet...so nobody here cares. I think a lot of people forget that Xilinx spent $10B+ develop their awesome devices. I figure we can do it with 1/10th of that.;-)
- cogman10 5mo agoIDK where it's at now, but 15 years ago xilinx was some of the most garbage software I'd ever worked with. Super buggy, constantly corrupting itself, and this was for me just doing university level projects. God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.
- rcxdude 5mo agoAll the FPGA vendors' tools are pretty bad, and have little incentive to improve because their software is the only option for using their chips, outside of a few niche (and generally quite small) devices.
- MisterTea 5mo agoQuartus was not much better on Linux. Honestly I was really into FPGA's around 2010-12 but gave up as I could not afford the full suites at the time and the software was fucking miserable to work with. They were prone to license amnesia and lord help you after running updates, something likely breaks. OR maybe one day it decides to not work anymore and crash continually. Then you spend hours gnashing your teeth, fighting the install, searching through forums and screaming into the void for help. It was mentally draining. FPGA software gave me FPGA PTSD. I still to this day don't want to go near them - but I am dying to get back into using them. Help ...
- colechristensen 5mo agoAll "software for hardware development" (I'm trying to figure out the right way to describe it) used to be exactly like that. I understand most of it still is.
- oytis 5mo agoNever understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?
- snarfy 5mo agoI'm guessing it works fine under Wine.
- chrsw 5mo agoImagine if AMD focused on making their tools better instead of resorting to sleazy tactics. Imagine if the whole industry made interoperable tools that worked on open data formats and competed on merit instead of customer lock-in. Imagine the world we could have.
- rolandog 5mo agoWe shouldn't wait for them to get their act together, as it's in the best interest of a cartel to not have competitors, compatibility, and transparency. It should be required after a certain amount of time that schematics and code be open sourced and that anti-walled-garden measures are prevalent so we get compatibility and extensibility right out of the box.
- chrsw 5mo agoI agree. But this will be fought tooth and nail.
- advael 5mo agoSmacks of collusion honestly. Maybe Microsoft offered them some kind of deal
- Henchman21 5mo agoI’ve always thought they were colluding with Nvidia, but then I suppose it could be both!
- advael 5mo agoThey've got a documented history of trying to strongarm everyone they can
- sheepscreek 5mo ago> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux” If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle. That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.
- ajross 5mo ago> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts. Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD. Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.
- jorvi 5mo agoWhat is really interesting about Linux users is that they cost an enormous amount in support. I think it was a dev of the reboot of Planetary Annihilation that said their Linux users / build made up a few percent of the sales but over 90 percent of all support tickets (!). Mind you that this was before Valve's Proton. Edit: It was <0.1% sales but 20% of all support tickets: https://xcancel.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760 https://xcancel.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760
- TheScaryOne 5mo agoWould you rather that the 100% of bugs in those 20% of tickets never got fixed? Linux users write highly detailed bug reports because it's the only way to get things fixed without coding the fix yourself.
- voakbasda 5mo agoWhelp, I’m an embedded engineering consultant and will no longer recommend these products to my customers. Or rather, I will ask them to avoid these products entirely. AMD, you can make more money selling chips than software, but take away the entry level software and you eliminate the on-ramp. I’m not buying a license to prototype.
- raverbashing 5mo agoI think AMD simply looked at the numbers and they get a lot of support requests for the free version, more than the Windows version (of course that's the bean counter calculation without factoring in "karma") And I kinda agree, the cost of supporting those tools on different platforms is not great Honestly just run Wine
- shevy-java 5mo ago> Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits. Eventually the empire will strike back though. I now marked AMD as a company that can not be trusted. We need more indie companies in general, and cheap 3d printing for the masses. It'll be a long way to go to nanoscale perfection, but we'll have to go it - AMD but also Intel before, showed that NONE of those mega-greedy corporations can be trusted. They'll always try to do a switcheroo move. But as I stated here: the empire will strike back eventually. The Barbara Streisand effect is real.
- jjice 5mo ago[dead]
- omgJustTest 5mo agoWhile Vivado/Vitis etc do amazing things, I challenge anyone to find a person who enjoys using them without TCL interfaces. These tools do need attention, it's too bad there's not a better model than subscription bases like these. Pretty sure, based on TCL base, that these tools were native Unix at some point, so the no-linux-free-beer vs windows-free-beer version are hilarious... Ultimately one has, with so many vendor tools, a windows box somewhere so make it a remote compile machine.
- greenail 5mo agoif "the ai" was delivering value you'd think it would be lowering both cost to develop these dev tools as well as the cost to support them. In that light the move is odd unless they don't know how to use AI to lower those costs or it cant.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoIs anyone else annoyed by the click-/rage-bait style of writing? Second: Can this software be run from Wine on Linux?
- mring33621 5mo agoKinda shitty but just a minor speed bump. Just run Windows on a VM in Linux, right?
- liendolucas 5mo agoAMD business should be selling FPGA hardware. The software suite should come for free. If it doesn't then people should not purchase AMD FPGAs. It is absurd that in 2026 you have to pay for such tools. It feels like buying a propietary compiler in 80's or 90's. No one wants that anymore.
- checker659 5mo agoNot to mention, the software is horrendous to use
- megous 5mo agoBloated and slow, but almost everything is automatable via TCL. A lot of the other profssional SW can only boast about being bloated and slow. Once you learn how to get automation to work for you, it's not that bad.
- megous 5mo agoWell, at least they don't really try hard to protect their software, unlike some other brands.
- littlecranky67 5mo agoFPGAs are mostly used for small series and custom hardware. If you add the software price to the FPGA unit price, it becomes more expensive if you buy, lets say, 1000 FPGAs to ship in your product. Even though you might only license the software once. It is a trade off, and I have no idea about the state and quality of Vivado. Back in the day I was tinkering with FPGAs, the Xilinx software stack was horrible.
- f1shy 5mo agoStill is. I think got a tiny little bit better, but sucks.
- littlecranky67 5mo ago
- BonoboIO 5mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisArchitect 5mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309
- cake-rusk 5mo agoWhat are some good alternatives (to Xilinx/AMD) for hobbyists / small outfits?
- mindcrime 5mo agoAs far as I can tell, Lattice products are the best if you're interested in using F/OSS tools. Yosys / Icestorm supports the Lattice ICE40 and ECP5 devices. QuickLogic also apparently do some officially supported F/OSS stuff for their devices, but I don't know much about them. Think I might have ordered one of their dev boards a while back, and then promptly put it on a shelf and still haven't gotten around to touching it. :-( The problem is, none of these devices can match the raw performance of the devices from Xilinx / Altera / Microchip / etc. So you're kinda limited if you are trying to do something that needs serious horsepower.
- unglaublich 5mo agoIt'll be shit for paying Linux customers too as a large user base of "free"-version Linux users could spot and report bugs easily.
- pushcx 5mo agoThis title and premise are incorrect. It's not a bait-and-switch unless the bait was unavailable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch Vivado really was available free. There's a lot of potential criticisms one could write of the decision to change that (and basically all of them were made in this and the previous thread), but bait-and-switch is not one of them.
- latchkey 5mo agoThis has been resolved and is no longer an issue. https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317 https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2059706563665998317
- xh638 5mo ago[flagged]