> I still do not understand for the life of me why manufactures do not
> provide such tools as C compilers for free.

See below...

> I even understand that it does take time and money to develop such tools
> and that somehow it has to be paid for.  But with the amount of chips
> being sold today, it amazes me that things like C compilers and the like
> are not avaliable for free.  So increase the price of each chip by a few
> cents.  You may argue that those that buy tons of chips are the ones that
> end up paying for the "free" tools, but that is the same way the assembler
> compilers that are available for free are paid for.

An assembler is NOT a compiler.  The difference between a compiler
of any sort, let alone C, and an assembler is HUGE.  The complexity
and development cost for a compiler, as well as the maintanence cost,
is HUGE.

The cost of these products is not negligible.  I would guess that
Microsoft probably spends as much or more money and effort on
their VisualStudio products as they do on Office, and it has a much
smaller target audience.  MUCH smaller.

As for Microchip, as has often been pointed out, they are in the
chip business, not the software business.  While it would be nice
for them to provide a free C compiler, they would either have to
devote pretty hefty resources to it, in which case it would likely
consume more than it produces, or produce a poor quality
product, in which case the only people who would use it are
hobbyists and low volume companies that can't afford a fancy,
higher quality compiler.  Either way, they don't stand to gain
by doing it.

It would probably be cheaper for them to give people buying
a certain volume from buy.microchip.com a license for someone
else's compiler, but that would then irritate other producers of
compilers, so...

Mike H.

-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist