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

AMD business should be selling FPGA hardware. The software suite should come for free. If it doesn't then people should not purchase AMD FPGAs.

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.

> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux”

If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle.

That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.

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.;-)

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.

Whelp, I’m an embedded engineering consultant and will no longer recommend these products to my customers. Or rather, I will ask them to avoid these products entirely.

AMD, you can make more money selling chips than software, but take away the entry level software and you eliminate the on-ramp. I’m not buying a license to prototype.

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

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

Is anyone else annoyed by the click-/rage-bait style of writing?

Second: Can this software be run from Wine on Linux?

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.

While Vivado/Vitis etc do amazing things, I challenge anyone to find a person who enjoys using them without TCL interfaces.

These tools do need attention, it's too bad there's not a better model than subscription bases like these.

Pretty sure, based on TCL base, that these tools were native Unix at some point, so the no-linux-free-beer vs windows-free-beer version are hilarious...

Ultimately one has, with so many vendor tools, a windows box somewhere so make it a remote compile machine.

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

Smacks of collusion honestly. Maybe Microsoft offered them some kind of deal

What are some good alternatives (to Xilinx/AMD) for hobbyists / small outfits?

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

It'll be shit for paying Linux customers too as a large user base of "free"-version Linux users could spot and report bugs easily.

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?

I'm guessing it works fine under Wine.

> 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?

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.

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

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254309

Kinda shitty but just a minor speed bump. Just run Windows on a VM in Linux, right?

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.

> Its comparatively smaller user base means less commercial pressure, making it an easy target to throw under the bus whenever companies feel like cutting costs or boosting profits.

Eventually the empire will strike back though.

I now marked AMD as a company that can not be trusted.

We need more indie companies in general, and cheap 3d printing for the masses. It'll be a long way to go to nanoscale perfection, but we'll have to go it - AMD but also Intel before, showed that NONE of those mega-greedy corporations can be trusted. They'll always try to do a switcheroo move. But as I stated here: the empire will strike back eventually. The Barbara Streisand effect is real.

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.

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.

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"'

I think AMD simply looked at the numbers and they get a lot of support requests for the free version, more than the Windows version

(of course that's the bean counter calculation without factoring in "karma")

And I kinda agree, the cost of supporting those tools on different platforms is not great

Honestly just run Wine

if "the ai" was delivering value you'd think it would be lowering both cost to develop these dev tools as well as the cost to support them. In that light the move is odd unless they don't know how to use AI to lower those costs or it cant.

Imagine if AMD focused on making their tools better instead of resorting to sleazy tactics.

Imagine if the whole industry made interoperable tools that worked on open data formats and competed on merit instead of customer lock-in.

Imagine the world we could have.

Incredible, behaving as if they want another CUDA situation.

That's what you get for using unfree software.

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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.

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.