Jim,
It isn't the lawyers that would have a problem with this: it is the regular rank and file engineers. We understand that most of what is there is (sorry) very poor quality, and that would reflect badly on Xilinx. Very badly indeed.
No company would put there name on such a mess: it is too much of a liability. Would you tell your boss that all your IP came from such a source? And expect to stay employed?
Think of it: do you ever get an email that says "I used that code, understood it completely without even reading anything, and it worked, and I am sooo happy."
Yes, sure.
Rather, you get (tens of) thousands of complaints....just read the newsgroup! Problems that are non-problems, problems that are easily solved by reading the data sheet, problems solved by a few simple experiments, it matters not: most people see a problem, and call up the help desk. If you are their biggest supplier, you get blamed for everything else (and we do often solve problems that do not even belong to us).
"Your chip is breaking my power supply" (* a real complaint!). We analyzed and fixed their power supply for them.
Don't get me wrong: I love getting tens of thousands of web cases. It allows us to measure how we improve, and measure how satisfied our customer's are. With 350,000 seats of software and tens of thousands of engineers designing every hour of every day, the web cases are a "heatbeat" and tell us immediately how well we are doing what we promised to do.
And this is for products, code, manuals, and services where we spend a great deal of time on, and pay a lot of attention to quality.
I was told many years ago by the "Bell System" that one half of all returned boards had no problems (the problem was in the imagination of the technician). This holds as true today as it did then: most (more than 1/2) of all reported problems are not really a problem (in a well run organization with a great product). Yes, all reported issues are taken seriously, and followed through on. Every time. That is how you get better.
Imagine what would happen with a cornucopia of stuff of totally unknown quality, and inadequate documentation! In other words, real garbage?
Lawyers? That is the least of our concerns: how about staying in business?
You can't impress anyone (for long) with having more garbage than your competitor.
Austin