It is absurd that in 2026 you have to pay for such tools. It feels like buying a propietary compiler in 80's or 90's.
No one wants that anymore.
It is a trade off, and I have no idea about the state and quality of Vivado. Back in the day I was tinkering with FPGAs, the Xilinx software stack was horrible.
Ideally yes, SW should be free, but we don't live in an ideal world. This isn't Apple or Google who can give you SW for free since they take a 30% cut on everything on the Appstore besides the profit margins on the HW they sell you.
The typical customers of FPGAs are large HW companies with money to spend on SW, not tinkerers in their garage who might some day build a billion dollar company. And if you do become a billion dollar garage company, you will still buy their FPGAs because they're some of the best and the SW costs will be a rounding error plus a tax write-off. You think Anduril doesn't use Xilinx FPGAs because Palmer LUckey didn't get SW for free 15 years ago?
So there's zero incentive to give away costly to develop SW, for free.
I don't think that's necessarily a hard rule, here. Nvidia won over the HPC segment by offering CUDA and PTX as a free value-add to their hardware, and ended up becoming a multi-trillion dollar company that ate AMD's datacenter market for lunch.
Giving away software to commoditize your compliment might be a good idea, for AMD.
Yeah but people would buy Nvidia chips mainly for gaming, not (just) for CUDA, so basically the massive gaming clientele would finance expensive projects that don't yet make any money like CUDA. Meanwhile nobnody buys FPGAs for playing at home en-masse. There's no equivalent consumer market like gamers for the FPGA vendors, their sales are almost exclusively B-2-B.
FPGAs isn't something most people, even the hardcore tinkerers ned at home. Consumers into hardware tinkering are more than fine with what you can do with Raspberry PIs, ESP32s, STM32 boards.
IMO, this is a question about where AMD wants to be in the stack. They can sell hardware, they can license their IP, but they're going to be bent over a table selling software licenses that people don't want. A free HDL software suite can help you sell hardware and license IP, whereas an expensive one can cut you out of the FPGA/ASIC market entirely.
That would then make you chips more expensive than the competition and less competitive on the BOM side, and BOM costs are a different accounting budget than SW licenses.
People in the industry have already thought of this. HN likes to think they somehow found the magic solution nobody ever has thought before, when the truth is HN doesn't understand sales of the HW industry.
Besides, "ignorant" HN comments on e.g. FOSS software and funding problems have mentioned that the paperwork you have to do to buy software licences can be a PITA, so free software can be perceived as a plus when the R&D selects the parts.
People have already thought of that, sure. But has it been thought about and executed properly? Like the added value of open-sourcing the SW (made a lot easier when you don't need to copy-protect it). Or do they just go for the extra source of profit the SW licence sales provides, anyway?
The company I worked for was selling million or tens of million of units per year. So in such cases it's easy to see why BOM costs trump the SW costs of a few licences, and why HW companies would like to keep chips costs down and charging you per SW license.
If you haven't shipped million of products in embedded and only worked in SW development, it's easy to get a warped picture of reality.
The cost of the software required to develop or operate the hardware should be included in the cost of the hardware. I say this as someone who's been into embedded development for 20 years. It's simply a part of the cost to make the hardware.
Support should be an additional paid service, that every single of my former employer would have paid. But the toolchain itself, as-is with no warranty, should be free.
Once you learn how to get automation to work for you, it's not that bad.