| ??? 02/15/11 12:00 Read: times |
#181102 - Free Tools.. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Neil said:
I guess Free Tools is a big one.
That's the thing with a single-source, closed, proprietary achitecture: you can count giving away tools as part of your marketing budget - since those tools are useless with anyone else's products! Indeed. Though in the case of Microchip they have a 'one for the masses and one for the classes' approach in the distribution of their software tools. For example, their MPLAB IDE comes in two versions; Eval(free) and Full (USD$495 + unrestricted optimisation). Point here is that in Microchip's case they aren't quite giving it all away, hopefully in an attempt to recover some of their software R&D costs as well.. Andy Neil said:
8051 vendors can't do that, as there would be no way to stop anyone taking, say, NXP's free 8051 compiler and using it with anyone & everyone else's 8051s. Same could surely be said for ARM vendors with the same ideas? I suppose the lack of standardisation on the peripheral side could be exploited here perhaps.. In either case, I digress. :-) Regards Valentin |
