[Aurornis]

There’s a lot of misinformation in this thread from people who didn’t know about Vivado until this controversy.

> 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.

Vivado has always been primarily a paid product, including on Linux. The free tier has been a limited version useful for small projects or as a trial, which can support a limited set of FPGAs. The paid tier licenses have price tags in the thousands.

They aren’t making new paid products for a growing user base. They are continuing to support their paid Linux user base.

[sheepscreek]

> They aren’t making new paid products for a growing user base. They are continuing to support their paid Linux user base.

I never said, or even implied that they are creating a new product. They are dropping the “free tier” or licence, if you will, because either a) they are starting to see this tier being used for commercial applications b) they are maintaining a completely separate code base/product for free users and don’t want to support its development anymore.

If it was b) they could have chosen to open-source it.

Any other reason that I can think of is probable but unlikely - like, there’s a non-zero chance they could be trying to beef up the revenue on paper, before selling off the FPGA unit, to focus on servers and GPUs.