Spartan-3 never had an open/accessible toolchain, IIRC. That's what put me off from investing my spare time in it.
mwbajor
The toolchain is free (not open source) unless you are building very very high performance products. Even in industry we use the free Vivado most of the time. At one point, there was some Synopsys products that groups were using but they lagged in features compared to the vendor tools.