On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 14:50:15 +0200, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:
>I can think of one reason for a chips vendor not to offer a free
>compiler: if they do, no-one else will likely offer another one. This
>might be a worse situation than having no free compiler but a bunch of
>competing commercial ones.
>

A very good point Wouter!

Just look at the number of 3rd party IDE's for the PIC -- virtually
NONE. Why? Because MPLAB is free and from Microchip. I'm not a big fan
of MPLAB, but I have no choice.

OTOH, I believe C compilers can be done with a model of:

1) cheap, entry level version. Code size limited. Lets you get your
hands on the real compiler, generate real code and do small projects.

2) A mid-range version, for a small cost (Maybe $100US?) that allows a
much larger program -- say 8K words for the PIC. Allows serious
development work for most projects and serious hobbyist, casual
professional use. The price point lets almost anyone have a "real
tool".

3) An unlimited version that does everything a professional developer
would want. No code size restrictions, more library functions, all
flavors of PIC supported, etc. For a professional developer who can
justify the cost -- and gets to earn income from it to pay for it ;-).

Development tools are a difficult proposition regardless because it's a
niche market of limited size (by desktop software standards).
Programmers have to eat and the engineering man hours required to
develop good tools is significant -- someone has to pay for them.
Divide those costs over a limited number of sales (even if you get a
huge market share) and you can see why good tools are expensive. Let's
face it, a simple bootloader or programmer is a small project compared
to a full IDE or C compiler for the entire PIC family.

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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