Not company supported, though, just reversed and company-tolerated. The investment was made by brilliant people donating their personal time, not the company funding an initiative - big difference there.
I think a truly "open" documentation and compilers model (like what AMD have been up to with their graphics cards) would still be a game-changer in the industry.
I honestly don't think opening up documentation would change a lot.
The medium hard part of FPGA tooling is synthesis, and the truly hard part is high performance placement and routing with low run times.
The competitive benefits of being good at that are huge, because it can literally mean the difference between choosing a component of one vendor vs the one of another. As a user, the tooling and the underlying HW architecture can be mostly treated as an inseparable blob: it's not as if you're going to design specifically for a particular FPGA logic element feature, you rely entirely on what the backend tool with do with it.
If I were Intel or AMD, I'd be fine with opening up some documentation that helps users to a certain extent, but I'd never agree to an open backend model.
With respect to opening the backend: it's also unlikely that your competitor is going to use your PnR against you, between patent encumbrance and backend silicon differences, no? This is the exact same argument as in graphics where AMD have done fine open-sourcing their compiler backends, nobody is going to cut-rate clone their silicon and NVidia are staying far, far away from any of the methods+processes there if they are smart.
With that said, I don't understand the FPGA market well enough to know if open tooling would be an advantage competitively.
With respect to opening documentation:
I really do wonder. I don't know the market well enough. For a "we need an FPGA because we need XYZ to be fast and don't have the volume/$ to tape out," of course a good PnR and meeting timing is the #1 concern, and a savvy buyer would choose the best performing solution even if the software suite is brutal to use. But for "we need a PLD for some glue logic, it doesn't need to be 100% blazing fast, it needs to meet XYZ requirements," would a buyer choose a toolchain that worked better and let their engineers go to market faster, even if the PnR wasn't quite as efficient? In that case, opening up documentation and letting the open-source ecosystem build out support could be valuable.
What would be telling here would be whether Lattice have seen a measurable sales impact from the reverse engineered open toolchain appearing for their parts. I cynically think that perhaps the idea is futile in this industry, but that's also what everyone thought about graphics and AMD went and did it anyway...
