Claire Xen  🏳️‍⚧️ 🏳️‍🌈 🧙🏻‍♀️ BLM  🏴 🚩

On that, I wish @arduino would have gone with @latticesemi fpga instead of Intel for their Arduino MKR Vidor 4000. Somehow feels surprising to me that Arduino went for a proprietary FPGA solution when there was some open source alternative out there. Cc @dcuartielles

I don't really want to enter into an endless discussion about this, but @latticesemi is not open source, it has been hacked. We have been trying to reach them to have a deeper discussion in this respect for some years now with no answer.

"hacked" is a pretty loaded way to describe it. they are well aware of the bitstream RE efforts and explicitly have no problem with it. what they don't do is spend any additional resources to help those efforts

(I am not a native English speaker so excuse my use of language.) But going back to the topic, the issue for me is that we produce 10s of 1000s of boards every week. How am I supposed to deal with something that works for as long as someone is maybe willing to support it?

I feel like you are mixing two things here that really have nothing to do with each other. One is whether the vendor gives any guarantees regarding long term availability of their part. The other is whether a part is open source and/or has an open source toolchains.

And I have to say the way you are confusing those things sounds to me very much like you are rationalizing at best or gaslighting at worst, not like you are trying to make a good faith argument.

I might be mistaken, I haven't checked in the last year or so, but Lattice's parts aren't open hardware. On the other hand, for Arduino it is very important to be sure that the efforts we make when manufacturing boards (and we make many boards) are backed by part availabilty