Why does every opensource/open hardware project using FPGA are xilinx

[legacy]

sold by Farnell, LOGI Pi uses Xiling's Spartan-6 LX9 fpga 

[hamster_nz]

- Many papilio clone

seriously, which one?
is there a clone of papilio ?
never seen 

I was asked for help with to help with a clone, which had a Spartan3E-100 on it, rather then a -250 or -500 that they make.

They do exist - and as they are an Open design nothing stops people making them.

[legacy]

well, the Papilio/Pro is physically described by an EagleCad v6 project (schematic + board), so .. you can reuse and modify it as you want

the question is: I have never seen a clone around, neither on ebay, nor on hack-a-day (I have some difficulties with google at the moment),
so I wonder where did he see those clones. Personally I modified the original papilio/pro because I wanted to add a FeRAM's socket on the PCB

a personal project, never published (and not yet completed)

[asgard20032]

http://saanlima.com/store/index.php?route=product/product&path=62&product_id=51

[mac.6]

Well it' s not only opensource project. Amost all FPGA board I have seen in my professional life are Xilinx also.
Most of them were used for emulation/RTL development, from single Virtex7 board up to massive 12 to 16 ones, not even mentioning synopsys zebu machines.
The only time I have seen an altera part was on a specialized debugger/tracer in a startup.

[asgard20032]

Where I live (canada, quebec), every university use altera.

[james_s]

There are open source projects out there that use Altera chips, here's one for example http://searle.hostei.com/grant/Multicomp/

I've ported all sorts of stuff to that same dirt cheap dev board and have released a few projects of my own on the same board. Some of them are hosted on the site of a friend of mine.

http://www.notanon.com/fpga/williams-pinball-system-3-and-system-4-sound-board-in-an-fpga/2015/12/04/


I use both Xilinx and Altera because there are advantages and disadvantages of each, well more specifically the software used to develop for each. Altera USB programming cables are also far cheaper than Xilinx. I've never used Lattice parts because the software seems to be harder to get hold of and I haven't seen any development boards. The nice thing about FPGA stuff is that most designs can be made reasonably platform-agnostic. It's almost always developed in either VHDL or Verilog and as long as you don't directly instantiate device primitives in the code it's fairly easy to port from one chip to another.