Lattice FPGA adds 'no reversing' clause for SDK built on reversed bitstreams | Hacker News Reader

Lattice FPGA adds 'no reversing' clause for SDK built on reversed bitstreams

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94 pointspaulgerhardt23 comments

Miserable. Even if it wasn't officially supported, I have fun messing with the iCE40 open source toolchain on my dev boards. In fact, the whole reason I know of Lattice is because of the open-source toolchain that was scraped together, by the community.

Stop flogging us for wanting to work on your chips and tools.

Absolutely pathetic and shortsighted. iCE40 is popular exclusively because of the reverse engineering work that this prohibits.

I was actually thinking that Lattice might be an interesting place to work, considering the growing open source ecosystem centered around their devices. No longer.

> iCE40 is popular exclusively because of the reverse engineering work that this prohibits.

ice40 is popular in the hobbyist market exclusively because of the reverse engineering work. I doubt it has made much of a blip in commercial use.

I always thought that commercial proposals grow and benefit from hobbyist market in a significant way. At least a bunch of commercial products which grew out of Kickstarter proposals. Maybe it's not a large case comparing with the whole industry of Lattice users?

> ice40 is popular in the hobbyist market exclusively because of the reverse engineering work. I doubt it has made much of a blip in commercial use.

The worst part is that I won't even consider a Lattice part for commercial products because I know they don't have the development resources over time to compete against Xilinx and Altera nee Intel.

Open sourcing their toolchain would actually change that calculation.

You could have said the same thing about Linux twenty years ago.

Update:

Thanks for pointing out a new bitstream usage restriction in the Lattice Propel license. It is not our intent to hinder open source tools. See https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lattice-semiconductor_lattice... re an updated license. We are excited with the open source community’s FPGA achievements and their potential.

https://twitter.com/latticesemi/status/1269115302140231682

This is the linkedin post:

To the open source community, thank-you for pointing out a new bitstream usage restriction in the Lattice Propel license. We are excited about the community’s engagement with Lattice devices and our intent is to not hinder the creation of innovative open source FPGA tools.

You can log into the Lattice website and check out the updated license text at https://www.latticesemi.com/Accounts/SignIn.aspx?media={26E9.... Please note that the license text is also replicated during install, and the new text will be available in tools available for download early next week. Thanks again for the feedback.

Old license: No reversing “Modules” - in particular “bit streams”.

New license: No reversing “Modules”.

They didn’t fix anything. They removed the clause which explicitly defines “bit streams” as “Modules” but kept the clause which prohibits reversing “Modules”. I’ll assume this is a clerical error in an effort to get legal to move on a fix in a day but as it stands the updated license still prohibits reversing bitstreams.

I had been excited about the iCE40 and was planning to get a dev kit, entirely because of the toolchain. Now that they are intentionally crippling the ecosystem the community was so gracious to create for them, there is no reason to even look into their products. I already have other devices that are locked down to all hell, and im not going to invest in using a new vendor unless they can be trusted to be better at a fundamental level.

Aside from the license, it's annoying that "Propel" is Windows only and only supports MachXO3D (though they say they will add more chips soon).

Also, I'm not a huge fan that they are copying Xilinx's "IP Integrator" graphical system builder. It would be far better if the tool was somehow HDL-centric instead of schematic-centric (not that I've tried it- just looking at the documentation).

The title might be a bit misleading -- I don't think Propel makes use of reverse engineered bitstreams.

Its licence does, however, prohibit using the product for reverse engineering.

Isn't this move more against the likes of GOWIN (who reportedly copied much of Lattice's design) than the open-source/hobbyist crowd?

GOWIN's design is very similar to the ECP5 in architecture, but the bitstream formats are notably different.

Please don't parse and understand this comment.

This is only for their propel sdk

BOOOOO000000!

Companies have a right to attempt to protect their IP

IP is theft

And we have the right to blast them on Twitter for taking open source code and slapping their own license terms on it.

They however shouldn't break the law in the process. I am not a lawyer, but using gcc would require them to license products in GPL-compatible ways.

Using gcc doesn't make your work gpl.

Distributing GCC does.

In some sense, yes, using GCC puts limits on what you can legally do. The intent of those limits is well explained by Stallman. In case of API I highly suspect the intent is there. Now, how that intent is interpreted by reading GPL is another matter - though it would be sad to find a company abusing the legal system.

This is unenforceable and what it does is alienate the open source community built around Lattice, that, I may say, has only helped their sales. Very short sighted move of them.

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