[diamondman]

This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more features' which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open, but we can't have it open because spending the time and money 'open sourcing' their docs......

I think there is a big difference between 'users wanting tools to be closed source' and 'users not caring if their tools are closed source'. And I would argue that even if the primary user base does not care, we can do better than that. It is no excuse to use these fragile lumbering behemoths of bad design and super seeeeecret tricks that you can learn in a university or the internet. And history keeps showing the problems of big black boxes with the words 'trust us' written on the outside. All we need is the layout and a map of the bitstream and open developers will do most of the work for these companies.

As for spending their resources 'driving prices down', that is quite relative. And if you look at the pricing model of their software it is clearly not their goal to make that reasonable (at least Xilinx). And every version of the software stretches to provide arbitrary bullet points on the back of a box that either mean nothing, were tested in suspicious conditions, or conflate multiple optimized tests together and say 'we are better than everyone at everything. How many times will that be said by all competitors at the same time, and how many times will it be believed? Anyways, with all those features, somehow ISE is still unstable on windows.

[gedrap]

>>> which they wouldn't have to do alone if it was open

Well, that's an assumption. User base is very small, and potential contributors base is even smaller. So that would be a big bet hoping that someone would contribute to make it worthwhile.

However, your statement is true when it comes to more mainstream technologies like ruby or javascript.

[phkahler]

But each company has it's own tools. That means redundant development. If they just worked on one set of open source tools, it should reduce development costs. It also opens the door to researchers to try things directly in the mainstream tools. That means not having to re-implement things published in papers, but instead deciding weather or not to merge a feature from a branch.