----- Original Message ----- From: Scott Dattalo To: Sent: Wednesday, March 31, 2004 5:45 PM Subject: Re: No help from Microchip for MPLAB Xwisp Integration :( > On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Sergio Masci wrote: > > > > > Possibly competitive advantage. > > > > Lets face it, if I want to sell chips and I have support software for them, I'm > > going to do much better than someone who has a clone of my chips with subtle > > differences and NO support software. Can you use Microchip's MPLAB to develop > > code for the Ubicom SX MCUs 100% effectively? I really doubt it. > > OTOH, A completely open PIC-development environment exists and it doesn't > support Ubicom processors either. This leads me to conclude that either > the open environment really sucks or that no one using SX processors is > motivated to make the minor changes necessary to support them. Another possibility exists: that changes to the open source environment have been made and that they have not been fed back. I have seen this attitude many times in all kinds of commercial environments. People take open source code, modify it and do NOT release the modifications back to the open source community. Their attitude is that it has cost them money to add the new features and they are not about to give their efforts away to their competition. Of course we would be talking about people developing products using MCUs in this instance and not the chip manufacturers. >It's not > clear (to me anyway) that a more open MPLAB would entice SX add ons. I really don't think you can conclude this from your observations of the gnupic tool chain. Sad but true fact is that most users do not want to get their hands dirty tinkering with the internals of open source software. I think there would be a totally different motivation involved if the tinkering allowed a chip manufacturer to piggyback onto the tools provided by a competitor. Regards Sergio Masci http://www.xcprod.com/titan/XCSB - optimising structured PIC BASIC compiler -- http://www.piclist.com hint: To leave the PICList mailto:piclist-unsubscribe-request@mitvma.mit.edu