The cost of the software required to develop or operate the hardware should be included in the cost of the hardware. I say this as someone who's been into embedded development for 20 years. It's simply a part of the cost to make the hardware.
Support should be an additional paid service, that every single of my former employer would have paid. But the toolchain itself, as-is with no warranty, should be free.
That would then make you chips more expensive than the competition and less competitive on the BOM side, and BOM costs are a different accounting budget than SW licenses.
People in the industry have already thought of this. HN likes to think they somehow found the magic solution nobody ever has thought before, when the truth is HN doesn't understand sales of the HW industry.
I don't think that's necessarily a hard rule, here. Nvidia won over the HPC segment by offering CUDA and PTX as a free value-add to their hardware, and ended up becoming a multi-trillion dollar company that ate AMD's datacenter market for lunch.
Giving away software to commoditize your compliment might be a good idea, for AMD.
Yeah but people would buy Nvidia chips mainly for gaming, not (just) for CUDA, so basically the massive gaming clientele would finance expensive projects that don't yet make any money like CUDA. Meanwhile nobnody buys FPGAs for playing at home en-masse. There's no equivalent consumer market like gamers for the FPGA vendors, their sales are almost exclusively B-2-B.
FPGAs isn't something most people, even the hardcore tinkerers ned at home. Consumers into hardware tinkering are more than fine with what you can do with Raspberry PIs, ESP32s, STM32 boards.
IMO, this is a question about where AMD wants to be in the stack. They can sell hardware, they can license their IP, but they're going to be bent over a table selling software licenses that people don't want. A free HDL software suite can help you sell hardware and license IP, whereas an expensive one can cut you out of the FPGA/ASIC market entirely.