Are you done with your tirade? If not, I'll happily add you to my kill list. This whole thread is just ridiculous. I can understand the grudge, but move on.
Synthesis was available, just not by renewal through Xilinx. Third parties still support the XC4000 series, it just costs money.
People who purchase old development boards through eBay should leave nasty feedback to the eBay seller if they're not warned that synthesis support is not available through the free tools. It's not necessarily cause for refund but it's evil to sell something that doesn't have an expected level of support. The poor eBay sellers indirectly get regulated by the buyers. It's not Xilinx's fault if there's a 3rd party purchase that wasn't properly researched.
We can agree to disagree about Xilinx's responsibility to provide full software support for products, both while product is actively on distributor's shelves (such as Digikey), and for a useful life thereafter (3-5 years). Austin's clear assertion is that this level of support is (and was) Xilinx's stated company position and mission, and has been met in an exemplary degree, superior to competitors ... I disagree strongly, with this particular event as clear evidence to the contrary.
If I've been inaccurate about this historical issue, please correct the specific points, and I quickly and willingly post a retraction for those points if you are correct.
Otherwise, I fully stand by my correction of Austin's less than accurate assertion about Xilinx's past support of it's products and customers.
The time frame we are discussing is 2003, when XC4K and Spartan parts were still shipping products, but a generation back. The parts were still on distributors shelves, and being sold, well after this abrupt withdrawal of ISE synthesis support.
There is still lots of new (old stock) inventory kicking around, partly because of this support issue.
Generally end-of-life warnings happen in stages ... notice to existing customers that production will end, and followed by notice to customers that device support and software support will freeze for a specific product. Normally there is plenty of advance warning for both. The timing for abandoning ISE XC4K/Spartan synthesis support was abrupt, so abrupt, that Xilinx was unable to honor customers license requests during the one year term of the ISE Foundation registration (NOT FREE - a couple grand a seat). Those that purchased the cheaper ISE Alliance license without synthesis support were not affected, as they had already gone out an directly purchased expensive synthesis support from a 3rd party.
I posted the letter from XIlinx support refusing to provide a new FPGA Express license key for the 1 year ISE Foundation license I had purchased at the time - it speaks for itself -- I purchased the expensive Foundation package with Xilinx provided synthesis tools (from a 3rd party), and Xilinx failed to deliver the required license.
Peter might want to claim that customers losing their key didn't do proper backups, but the truth is that XIlinx did not provide ANY written documentation to customers in advance on how to circumvent the FPGA Express copy protection ... that would probably have been in violation of their contract with that software vendor.
I don't dispute the accuracy of your points, just the severity.
I appreciate your signing the letter so I can finally tell that this familiar, disturbing anger is from the same individual already in my kill file. To fpga_toys gets added Totally_Lost.
I like that these kinds of forums are a way to disseminate information and attain assistance or insights that you can't get from websites. I don't appreciate getting my stomach in a knot because one individual has a massive chip on his shoulder. I appreciate the freedom of this forum to accept that kind of behavior - it's mostly a free society after all. But at least I have the freedom to avoid the hatred being shoved in front of my face.
Open source cable drivers? Have I missed something?
As of today, I am still using an unsupported, third party cable driver (that is open source, true) for programming my dev board from Linux. And it's completely user space so that I can run any kernel I want :-)
None the less, having an officially supported driver from Xilinx would be better as I finally could complain about impact being unstable without fear that it will be attributed to my cable driver.
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