It's the programming model, not the FPGA itself that people are asking to be free (as in freedom, not cost). Comparing to the world of software: the FPGA is an

It's the programming model, not the FPGA itself that people are asking to be free (as in freedom, not cost). Comparing to the world of software: the FPGA is analogous to the CPU, the programming model is analogous to the instruction set, the tool chain is analogous to the compiler and the hardware Description Language" is analogous to source code. The freedoms that apply to software/compiler/information can equally be applied to their analogue in the FPGA space. Incidentally, FPGAs start at US$1.24 in single unit quantities from Digikey, and go up from there. US$6.75 will buy a "proper" logic cell based FPGA. They are no more expensive than a CPU. A Zynq development board, which has 2 x ARM cores with integrated FPGA, can be had for US$119 [1]. https://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/featured-products/products/parallella-16-micro-server https://adapteva.myshopify.com/collections/featured-products... --- Edit: fixed price on dev. board