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The difference is necessity. I need a computer for my work and it would be infeasible to use 100% open source hardware. I don't need to play with FPGAs, but I w

• VLM 14y ago
  "The difference is necessity." That has to be carefully defined. My point with the eprom anecdote was that you're stuck with closed source if you put a z80 core and some rom/ram/decode logic in a FPGA and do a synthetic SoC and merely avoiding FPGA and doin' it with discrete Z80 and eprom and sram and some glue isn't going to save you, because in 2013 using PC hardware you pretty much need a closed source windows only USB eprom programmer. So if you're stuck with closed source doing a hobby project, at least do something "cool" and use the FPGA. To do "about the same thing" but open source there are several completely open source alternatives that would result in CPU controlled I/O ports being wiggled. Avoiding closed source is not just as simple as saying "no FPGAs" or closed source is solely a disease of FPGAs. for example it took years as I recall before the Propeller had a non-windows/dos stack, although the BST works pretty well now. Confusing the issue, if you just want to play around with Verilog as a language or abstract technology, Icarus is free software part of the GnuEDA project. Obviously that's playing with simulation not silicon, but it is possible. So you don't have to entirely avoid FPGA technology.