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

41–50 of 171 posts

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

#41

Post by perlgeek »

eecc wrote: post #34
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #31

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?

It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.

Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux.

So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?

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

#42

Post by rob_c »

ginko wrote: post #11

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.

But you just showed you have deep pockets and they think they can get you to open it again every year for the rest of time.

Xilinx was never positioned that it made sense for them to open it up. If/when it gets run into the ground by AMD short sightedness they might just open it to claim that was the plan all along...

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

#43

Post by theresistor »

wongarsu wrote: post #35
Novosell wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor. If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia. A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?

AMD also had the strongest offering for GPU and CPU using the same memory with the same address space. That allows you to switch between CPU and GPU processing for the same data, without paying the cost of moving the data to and from the GPU. Similar to what we now have on Apple silicon They tried to push the same into the desktop market with their APUs, where it was mostly ignored. But console games only target a co…

Also also, AMD’s play has always been to produce HW that offers good performance/$, with the downside of having much weaker SW offerings to go with it.

Consoles are always pressured to minimize upfront purchase costs, and they generally replace the vendor-provider SW stack with their own anyways.

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

#44

Post by philistine »

Novosell wrote: post #24
fer wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm even surprised they have so much of the console market

I imagine it's due to having had decent enough GPUs and decent enough CPUs, from a single vendor. If you want the platform to be x86 but not AMD then your only other choice is Intel, but they've only recently started making high performance GPUs. So then you need another vendor for the GPU, and your only choice is Nvidia. A lot simpler, cheaper and predictable to go with a single vendor for both I imagine?

You’re approaching this as if every company had the same corporate intentions.

Nvidia never cared much for those types of deals. They preferred to lose Apple as a business than to admit fault, they’ve always refused to compete on price for the business of Sony and Microsoft’s consoles. They’re adamant to beat at the sound of their own drum.

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

#45

Post by rob_c »

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?

Think academic and small companies who don't pay for support opening corner case issues all the time publicly. They want none of the complex support unless you pay (reasonable imo).

And for those who forget RHEL for instance has to pay salaries to back port fixes and such and the same logic applies here.

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

#46

Post by rob_c »

lefra wrote: post #30
Meneth wrote: post #22

That's what you get for using unfree software.

There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).

I'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings

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

#47

Post by cogman10 »

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.

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

#48

Post by oaiey »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #39
dgacmu wrote: post #13

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.

Very few, entreprise users (aka volume) will pay the license, hobbyists will pirate it if need be. AMD doesn't want to do support for the hobbyists for free, that's all.

Understandable. But would it be much easier to release it without promise to support. That everyone would just accept.

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

#49

Post by adamas »

perlgeek wrote: post #41
eecc wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still free on Windows. Your argument doesn’t have legs to walk on.

Even more than that, they still have to maintain the software to work on Linux, because they have a paid on Linux. So if they have to keep maintaining it and offer the basic tier for free on Linux... just why? It doesn't make any sense to me. Maybe they receive "too many" bug reports from Linux users?

And not because Linux is more buggy but because Linux is populated with people that tend to know how to make bug reports ?

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

#50

Post by cogman10 »

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #31

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?

AMD isn't giving away free stuff. They are selling FPGA hardware. But further, the free stuff has a lot of restrictions around it which practically gear it only for university usage. And the reason they do that is they want to have new graduates have experience with their software so they can demand it from their future employers.
Post reply on HN