Why Lattice Semiconductor buying a x86_64 BIOS company shows engineer disrespect

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation once banned the reverse engineering of their FPGA tools and also possibly their FPGA chips, saying:

"In particular, no right is granted hereunder […] (3) for reverse engineering a bitstream format or other signaling protocol of any Lattice Semiconductor Corporation programmable logic device." and

"You may use any software provided on this website provided that you agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of the software license agreement(s) accompanying such software. You may not modify, reverse engineer, or disassemble any of the software, except as expressly permitted by the terms of the license agreement for such software." and

"2.9. Restrictions: You may not (and may not allow anyone else to): […] (b) decompile, reverse engineer, or otherwise attempt to derive the source code for any Licensed Product or any underlying algorithms, user interface techniques, or other ideas embodied in a Licensed Product;"

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation later said:

"To the open source community, thank-you for pointing out a new bitstream usage restriction in the Lattice Propel license. We are excited about the community’s engagement with Lattice devices and our intent is to not hinder the creation of innovative open source FPGA tools.

You can log into the Lattice website and check out the updated license text at https://lnkd.in/gUr6NMa. Please note that the license text is also replicated during install, and the new text will be available in tools available for download early next week. Thanks again for the feedback."

The way they worded their response to this sounds like how a politician doesn't want to reveal all of the text of a bill that they want to pass because they don't want congress to read it and just "Make it law now! No need to read the 500 pages of this bill! We're short on time!" (Also they want you to make a Lattice Semiconductor Corporation account to read it.)

Now that Lattice Semiconductor Corporation has completed their acquisition of American Megatrends, Inc., a x86_64 BIOS company, they have shown that they are humiliating the engineers that work the hardest at their company. Their engineers have poured a lot of their talents and resources into their FPGA products and proprietary FPGA tools even, only for Lattice Semiconductor Corporation's marketing department to be disrespectful to their engineers and buy a x86_64 BIOS company for $1.65 Billion Dollars.

If they need a CPU ISA for Secure Boot, Keystore, an A.I. NPU to detect patterns in files to compress faster and harder, and even hardware acceleration algorithms, there exist free and open source CPU ISAs and free and open source hardware acceleration algorithms whose source code they could've used to save $1.65 Billion Dollars.

Source: https://www.ami.com/resources/lattice-semiconductor-acquires-ami/

Edit: I have never worked at any FPGA Company except my own company, VitaSet LLC, of which I am the Founder and CEO of.

My Vita FPGA Architecture that I wrote entirely from scratch is 100% free and open source and is bugfree.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073595

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