Comment Re:And Lattice wont shut this project down because (Score 1) 107
Basically, hardware companies are, on the whole totally mental. For some reason, they have all their expertise in hardware and produce hardware for a living and then throw a total shitfit over the software and believe that their super special awful crashy piece of shit software is really the important thing and wrap it up in all sorts of proprietary licensing "solutions" designed to make life as hard for the paying customer as possible, when what the customer really wants to do is make some cool shit with the hardware, and maybe sell a bunch of stuff based on it.
OTOH, perhaps Lattice is currently licensing their POS toolchain, so something like this would mean they have no longer have to license and pay $$$ for the stuff.
Few hardware companies get it - they can produce good hardware, but they invest practically nothing in software - thinking it comes for free or something like it.
Considering Lattice isn't one of the big guys in the whole FPGA business, I'm sure they have to pay Synopsys or Cadence for a lot of the tools. Or provide support to them so customers buy those tools to use their chips.
A project like this would mean they could "own" their own toolchain and be able to provide a low-cost software solution for people to use their chips. And the only reason hardware guys do software is to sell more chips.