On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 12:12 AM, Peter wrote: > Xiaofan Chen gmail.com> writes: >> Microchip rationale, somewhat confirmed by the class attendance, is that >> it does not make sense to make the effort to support an operating system >> for a potential incremental audience of just 1% =85 > > That is probably true *now*, but not tomorrow. Anyway, one does not suppo= rt an > operating system, but a platform. Since Sun (netbeans etc), Mozilla, Adobe > Acrobat etc can 'afford' to support major applications on this and other > platforms that explanation sounds fairly lame. That is a very different world. Sun, Mozilla, Adobe are all software compan= ies (ok, Sun has hardware as well). Microchip is a chip company and they are selling chips. They can just bearly support MPLAB IDE and other tools. Just read all the negative comments about MPLAB 8.x here: http://forum.microchip.com/tt.aspx?forumid=3D57 > Anyway, usually just releasing > the specs for the relevant interfaces works wonders, and is the lowest co= st > option (no liability yada yada). The open source community has a way to p= ick up > these specs and create competitive applications from scratch. That is kind of true. >> But you see, this is a catch-22, a vicious circle. The lack of tools att= racts >> no users, hence no attendance to the class which, in turn, guarantees th= at >> no development will be funded=85 > > Exactly, see above. There are several hardware vendors who are avoided li= ke the > plague by open source enthusiasts, as they do not provide information to = write > drivers. Unsurprisingly, those vendors claim that 'there is no demand for= Linux > drivers for their products'. By avoiding like the plague I mean actually = not > buying a product, such as a laptop or a camera, that uses chipsets or fir= mware > from these blacklisted vendors. Blacklisting is defined as 'no support' m= entions > in archived internet messages and/or on open source software compatibilit= y lists. Again, MCU industry is a different world. You have to use MCUs for your pro= ject and basically none of them offer a Linux software package, especially in the lower-end 8bit/16bit world. So you can not avoid them. > NNALA [*], > Peter > > *) Not Necessarily A Linux Advocate, not to mention GPL per se > I am not either. But I can say I have great sympathy about Linux and I think it is already an important platform now for IT industry and will be an important platform for other industry and home users as well. As for GPL, I think it is a good license for desktop software. Xiaofan -- = http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist