Haha, not at all. I do not take it as an attack or anything :). The UI is obvious. The inability to use most of the intermediate file formats for anything sinc

Haha, not at all. I do not take it as an attack or anything :). The UI is obvious. The inability to use most of the intermediate file formats for anything since they are secret formats is annoying. If I remember correctly it had dependencies on Java and Mono. The command line tools are archaic and very difficult to use even before realizing they are not documented out of the fear of giving something away about how anything works. The iMPACT for programming chips incorrectly loads the libusb.so file and has to be LD_PRELOADed on linux, but even then there is some weird race condition that makes it work 1 out of 4 times. In order to do anything you have to download and install 15 gigs of data and agree to aggressive licenses. The compiler tool chain usually is a compiler and a linker. I could understand if you said that the place and route was more of a linker step, but people often call the full process 'compilation'. The fact that stitching the modules together and actualizing the equivalent of addresses and instructions (in CPU terms) is a physical fitting and box packing problem in an FPGA does not make it a fundamentally disparate step to me. Wow, I did not know that about the ARM compilers. I must have got the wrong impression from forum posts on the use of GCC for ARM chips. That makes me pretty happy, particularly that ARM is helping with the open tools. I will say though that this feels like it is supporting my point because people are using the non vendor tools. If support is a concern, support is not something that only a big company can provide. Postgres provides support and adds features on auction. I will admit that the responsiveness of Oracle for their customers having a need is much bigger and more organized, but it better be for what people pay for that. With the Oracle example, I think I am leaning towards 'there will always be room for a proprietary solution to handle edge cases of a market' instead of open solutions will not work as well as proprietary ones and are unable to be the defacto standard.