[Crisco]

I was complaining about that the other day. I'm a pretty big fan and proponent of the Libre software movement and have recently decided I want to help with an open hardware movement because it is almost impossible to do any serious work with FPGAs using only FOSS. Does anyone know of any good places to start and help?

[gh02t]

The Lattice boards mentioned above are a good start. Really they're your only choice since they're the only open source toolchain, but the iCEStick is a pretty good place to start. It's a decent FPGA in a USB stick form factor and it's self contained so you don't need an external programmer. At $25 it won't break the bank.

If you meant more how to get involved with the community effort, I'd start with Clifford Wolf's page (http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ ). He's the main guy behind the efforts with the iCE40 toolchain and his page links to some other efforts to reverse engineer Xilinx and Altera chips. There's a lot of interest in more open FPGAs, but I think there's a lack of skilled people so you'd likely be welcome.