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Comment by xvilka | Hacker News Reader

Problem with Xilinx is their IDE/toolchain. Hopefully SymbiFlow[1] will take off.

What problem? Can you imagine some open source toolchain used in corporate setting? Who’s supporting it? And who is liable?

Open source and enterprise aren't incompatible e.g. Red Hat.

In Xilinx case some chips are also involved. It’s not simple case with software only.

Open source is used in every enterprise e.g.

Datastax (Cassandra), Confluent (Kafka), Oracle (MySQL), Hortonworks (Hadoop), Databricks (Spark), Everyone (Kubernetes).

Vendors support the products but people know it's open source and potentially liable to fail.

Proprietary software companies are equally likely to fail, and take the source code down with them. Free Software (and, to a lesser extent, Open Source) are less risky than proprietary software.

> Can you imagine some open source toolchain used in corporate setting?

I am working on a multi-billion dollar project and we rely on GCC to build our software. It seems obvious when dealing with "pure" software. It seems unthinkable with "hardware level" software (for FPGA).

> Who’s supporting it?

Each time we have needed specific expertise, we have paid an external company (Embedded Brains) to provide expertise and updates/fixes.

Everything they do ends up being-opensourced. Their expertise is valuable. However, if they disappear tomorrow, we have everything needed to keep the rest of the project going without major disruptions.

> And who is liable?

I guess every entity involved is liable for its own scope/level. It's not like we will sue the company that provided the toolchain if they are the root cause for a critical anomaly makes it to the end product and nobody noticed that during testing.

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