Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

itsfoss.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 171 posts

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

#71

Post by awjlogan »

altairprime wrote: post #61
fsh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivado is an IDE for programming AMD FPGAs. One cannot use it without buying AMD hardware.

Hardware isn’t where the margins are, and probably is somewhat of a loss leader for small-batch users; for hobby users I would hazard a guess that they’re running at around -10% profit on small sales to try and drive subscription revenue multipliers, and for already-paying users this change is essentially irrelevant and will have zero downside impact on sub revenue. Terrible way to run a profitable business if you fu…

This is not the case here as the software is required to use the hardware they’re selling at any quantity. The software is cost entirely for them, if you’re not buying the hardware you’re not using the software. Given they support Linux for the paid version, its development is already paid for. Absolutely say you won’t provide support for free tier users. Today’s free tier users are tomorrow’s purchasing managers. FPGA is not a big market, so you have to capture comparatively few people for each unit of market share. Good silicon without good software is just very expensive sand.

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

#72

Post by amelius »

SecretDreams wrote: post #28
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #2

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.

AMD has long been the proof that hardware is easier than software. Apparently, hardware is also easier than marketing.

I wish more software engineers found out how easy hardware actually is.

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

#73

Post by linuxftw »

techcode wrote: post #27
linuxftw wrote: post #23

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…

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?

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.

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

#74

Post by sheepscreek »

> “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.

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

#75

Post by rolandog »

chrsw wrote: post #68

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.

We shouldn't wait for them to get their act together, as it's in the best interest of a cartel to not have competitors, compatibility, and transparency.

It should be required after a certain amount of time that schematics and code be open sourced and that anti-walled-garden measures are prevalent so we get compatibility and extensibility right out of the box.

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

#76

Post by voakbasda »

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.

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

#77

Post by rcxdude »

cogman10 wrote: post #47
adapteva wrote: post #40

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 a…

IDK where it's at now, but 15 years ago xilinx was some of the most garbage software I'd ever worked with. Super buggy, constantly corrupting itself, and this was for me just doing university level projects. God speed if you can get something a lot better for a lot cheaper.

All the FPGA vendors' tools are pretty bad, and have little incentive to improve because their software is the only option for using their chips, outside of a few niche (and generally quite small) devices.

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

#78

Post by ajross »

sheepscreek wrote: post #74

> “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 us…

> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.

Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts.

Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD.

Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.

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

#79

Post by raverbashing »

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

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

#80

Post by shevy-java »

> 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.

Post reply on HN