AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes

wewewedxfgdf

It's long been said: "AMD never misses a chance to miss a chance." In this case, the chance to trash its reputation with customers.

azalemeth

I 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.

bravetraveler

Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.

donohoe

Discussion from 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309

officialchicken

Advanced Marking Disaster original thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309

zx8080

> 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?

ginko

When 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.

dgacmu

Large 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.

rvz

Earlier discussion: 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

The 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"'

Meneth

That's what you get for using unfree software.

linuxftw

This 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.

cozzyd

I 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

Folks 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?

boomskats

Pretty 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

pjmlp

Always think about stuff like this, when asserting how much better AMD happens to be versus NVidia.

lvl155

AMD 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

Exactly 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/projects/wildebeest 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.;-)

oytis

Never understood why FPGA vendors do it. Do they desperately want to show software ARR to shareholders?

snarfy

I'm guessing it works fine under Wine.