> “Until now, it has been available for free on both Windows and Linux”

If it’s any consolation, it wasn’t and still isn’t available on macOS. Also the part about Linux having a “small user base” made me chuckle.

That’s the opposite of what I’m observing. If they wanted to save costs, they would have dropped Linux support altogether. But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux. Still, there are much better ways to handle this without alienating your user base.

There’s a lot of misinformation in this thread from people who didn’t know about Vivado until this controversy.

> But instead, they are making it a paid benefit. It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.

Vivado has always been primarily a paid product, including on Linux. The free tier has been a very limited version useful for small personal projects or as a trial.

They aren’t making new paid products for a growing user base. They are continuing to support their paid Linux user base.

> It can only mean that their Linux user base is growing, ie. more commercial operators are turning to Linux.

Well, more correctly that they think the commercial base has grown, and that there's revenue on the table by forcing their standard-edition-using commercial Linux users into contracts.

Maybe the thinking is that the Linux users are more sophisticated and able to self-support than windows shops, and so they're choosing not to buy support even though they could? Seems not implausible, though hard to measure even from within AMD.

Basically this seems like a "good beancounting but terrible marketing" decision out of product management. They're not being deliberately mean to their amateur users, they're just trying to squeeze out a few more dollars for their department's quarterly.