Re: Where is Open Source for FPGA development?
- From: fpga_toys@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: 13 Apr 2007 18:37:48 -0700
On Mar 25, 11:11 pm, "Daniel S."
<digitalmastrmind_no_s...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
While it would certainly be nice to have open-source tools to support FPGA
development (more options is almost always good for those days where
ISE&all keep on crashing and burning), the rather small world-wide pool of
FPGA people with both the programming knowledge and motivation to build and
maintain this sort of project as volunteers is, unfortunately, almost
certainly far too small.
Actually, many of the large open source projects are full time staffed
by industry
giants ... for example many of the linux developers have a day job
maintaining
linux for their respective empoyer's hardware platforms ... in IBM,
SUN, HP,
etc ... while also having hat's as core developers in various distro's
as a paid
job. Much of the integration and testing of distro's is also funded
day work, via
contracts ... it's how RedHat engineers get paid.
This is big business, not just volunteer work. The hardware interfaces
into computers
and not "just easy" pieces of code to develop and maintain, and are
loaded with heavy
IP rights ... just like the internal chip interfaces for FPGA's. The
difference is, that
software developers took those interfaces public with open source
operating systems.
If it can work for operating systems and major distro's ... then it
can work in other
industries where there is leadership in open source to obtain
advantages for both
the Corporations and their customers. So far, Xilinx and Altera are
not taking that
lead ... which should result in a significantly better tool set for
the industry.
As I have suggested before ... places where vendors are crying about
not having
enough funds to support their product lines (IE dropping support for
entire product
lines like the XC4K chips) while new product is on the shelf in
distribution and
production inventory ... could have done that much better by turning
over to a
customer/vendor open source partnership.
We hear frequently here that vendors cann't support anything other
than the top
few dozen customers ... that changes with active open source industry
partnerships
which are lead by industry paid staff.
John
.
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