It boils down to economics: 3rd party companies that make EDA tools for the semiconductor industry can't tweak and sell their tools at a premium to the embedded designers that use FPGAs. The reason is the FPGA designers already get their tools for free from the FPGA vendor.
Moreover, the article states FPGA vendors spend more money on development of tools than on the development of the FPGAs themselves!
This is I think what the issue is. The FPGA industry has created a lock-in since they are the ones supplying both the tools and the FPGAs themselves.
The tool-chains for FPGAs have become so complex that they themselves cannot make them if asked to repeat, much in the similar fashion as Microsoft could not have created software to open .doc formats from scratch that is fully compatible with existing .doc files.
Free tools implies third-party companies cannot readily enter the game because the customers would not be ready to pay (even though they already are effectively paying for the tools, but why pay for them twice). Again, this is same as Microsoft bundling Windows with laptops people buy without realizing that those laptops could have been cheaper if they were loaded with Linux and there were no political moves from somewhere to prevent that from happening.
To me, these are signs of a pending disruption. Watch-out however since many companies have attempted this in the past and have not survived.
http://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4330078/EDA-tools-f...
It boils down to economics: 3rd party companies that make EDA tools for the semiconductor industry can't tweak and sell their tools at a premium to the embedded designers that use FPGAs. The reason is the FPGA designers already get their tools for free from the FPGA vendor.
Moreover, the article states FPGA vendors spend more money on development of tools than on the development of the FPGAs themselves!