Free Tools?

Altera offers the Lite edition for free, but this will always be the lower end of the cheaper devices (arrias, cyclone and MAX). You also will not have access to many IP cores (For example, I think PCIe and Ethernet IP cores are excluded).

These tools will never be open source, and because of the massive task in fitting information (and probably propriatery and secret) on how to actually fit logic onto a device, there likely never will be. So you will have to take what you are given if you want to get into the FPGA world.

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PS As long as FPGA manufacturers charge money for their software tools, there will never develop a maker community experimenting with them as a hobby.

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Maybe not, but this will not bother the $5bn dollar companies xilinx and altera. Hobbiest buy chips in singles. They are far more interested in the companies that buy them in the 1000s