That's what you get when it's not open source...
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Read the entire article, despite not having heard about Vivado previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if a certain company ending in ~~soft~~ slop is somehow involved.
The thing that makes sense to me (purely speculative, no real info to back this) is that Microslop isn’t happy about losing money and the user base, so they are pushing their hardware partners to force users back to the platform.
Redis did exactly this back in March 2024, dropping its long-standing BSD license for the more restrictive dual licensing model, and the blowback was severe enough that the community forked it into Valkey almost immediately.
Sounds like this is probably the best approach and outcome for the Vivado community and software. The end of the article recommends either joining in the discussion on AMD’s forums (which only seems to be getting stonewalled) or joining the growing number of people on hacker news.
That's the second-best approach. The best approach is for it to be copyleft instead of permissively-licensed to begin with.
Uggghhh. Thankfully, I’ve never even heard of this program, but this sets a poor precedent for their future endeavors
Vivado is software for designing hardware on an FPGA. AMD bought out Xilinx, one of the big FPGA manufacturers, a few years back. FPGAs are basically programmable digital circuits: you configure a series of internal logic gates to represent the function of a circuit with memory, data busses, registers, gates, etc. In this fashion, an FPGA could be programmed to function like a CPU, a radio, a video encoder, or nearly any other piece of digital hardware. Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.
The thing with FPGA software is that there are no open source alternatives. FPGAs have so many complicated blobs and signing keys and proprietary IP blocks that your only choice is to use the manufacturer's offering.
Very useful for hobbyists and prototyping.
True, but that is not the only thing they are useful for; e.g. many high end measurement instruments ship with FPGAs so they can get improvements after release for functionality where implementing it in software would be too slow.
It is insane to me that something as conceptually basic as FPGAs can even be made proprietary at all, much less that being the universal state of them.
Lattice device support some open toolchains, or relatively open compared to the big two. Or something like that, never got to work with them yet.
Thanks, that’s basically what I gathered from the article but I didn’t do any further research.