- Well there you go, "victory" for the Linux community:
> We’ve heard the feedback from the FPGA and Linux developer community regarding upcoming Vivado licensing changes, particularly concerns around Linux support.
> Supporting developers across diverse workflows and environments remains important to AMD. To address this feedback, we will continue Linux support in Vivado Basic with the upcoming Vivado 2026.1 release.
Everyone is "happy" (For now.) But believe them the first time and look at the canned response they gave to you. They (AMD) are still not your friends.
Until next time.
- Yes. Great news, for now.
Trust is hard to gain, but easy to lose.
- Or, as they say in AMD's case: they never miss a chance to miss a chance
- Don't mess with us again AMD! Lest you rouse our anger.
- I find myself wondering whether AMD has made some absurd high-level error like treating the Vivado as a separate business division with its own expenses and revenue and expecting it to be profitable.
One thing that AI is not about to solve is executives completely missing the point :)
- Naturally, common MBA stuff.
- I don't understand the fuss about this. Offering freeware as marketing gimmick so you can work in the most propietary closed software domain (fpgas toolchains)?
- That "freeware" is not a marketing gimmick.
Because AMD (formerly Xilinx) does not provide complete technical documentation for their FPGAs, the only way for using the products that you buy from AMD is that "freeware".
Therefore that is not "freeware", but an indispensable component of what AMD sells and advertises as "field-programmable" and customers buy from them.
Calling it "free" or "freeware" is either a shameless attempt to obfuscate what it really is or a demonstration of incompetence of the people at AMD, who fail to understand what they are selling.
Based on the previous notice from AMD, I had just canceled buying some AMD Kria modules. With this change, I will reluctantly go ahead, but I worry about being dependent of a company that may make their products unusable with this kind of decisions.
- Related previously:
Why is Vivado 2026.1 dropping Linux support for free tier?
- snort "We appreciate the community’s candid feedback and ongoing engagement as we continue improving the developer experience"
Feedback like "WTF are you guys smoking?" and "Time to go elsewhere, Efinix look good, Gowan a close second" etc. etc.
This is not the sort of feedback one should be receiving let alone appreciating. Do your job right, and people wouldn't be giving you feedback like this.
48 points by hasheddan 5 hours ago | 10 comments