No matter how easy it will become to maintain a third party device
programmer, it truly is a never-ending project that still requires a lot of
energy for a one-man operation. It is very difficult to anticipate how new
programming specifications will differ from existing ones and they, like
everything else in this world, change over time. Then if you want to
automate testing  someone has to spend the time to develop those automated
tests -- it's a lot of work. But like I said before it's also fun and
rewarding.

After the initial sale of the device programmer to the customer, usually no
more income will come in because it's very hard to compete with free device
programmer software/firmware upgrades. 'Everything for free' seems to be the
mantra these days.

Microchip is the lucky one -- at least the development costs of the tools
they produce are basically subsidized by their core business.
But one can also make the argument that without the existence of their
development tools in the first place, they would not be able to sell their
core products either.

Regards,

Ken Pergola

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