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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I don't see how that particular line of thinking applies when: 1) They continue to have a free version for Windows 2) They continue to have a version for Linux

I just can't see that cost of having a free Linux version (on top having a paid Linux version) is big?

Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).

And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.

Xilinx is/was an FPGA company until AMD bought them. Their primary revenue stream is selling chips. This is the equivalent of going back to the days of paid C/C++ compilers (anybody else remember that?).

Again that reasoning falls apart because they offer free Windows version. So basically those academic/small companies are incentivised to switch to Windows (or use Wine/Proton) to use this software?

And that's aside the fact that if support cases are the actual issue - they could (and probably already do that) just not allow free users to open/submit bug/support cases.

I literally explained the thinking that the free builds on Linux aren't worth it. If you've ever shipped production software, you'd know this. Just because there's a free build available for Windows doesn't mean it costs the company $0 to release the free build. It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release. There might be many differences between the Windows and Linux builds, such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.

There's no bait and switch. It's just people expecting things for free, as always, when this was never an open source project.

This ignores that their revenue comes from selling chips. The software enables that. No software, no chip sales. This can only have a negative impact on their sales.

> It's a lot of extra time and QA for each variant of a release.

In Vivado, it's the same release for the free and expensive builds on both Linux and Windows. It's just a question of the installed license file/license limits.

> such as the Linux builds require proprietary 3rd party code with royalties, and they chose not to eat that cost.

This seems unlikely for a multitude of reasons.

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