Xiaofan Chen gmail.com> writes: > That is a very different world. Sun, Mozilla, Adobe are all software > companies > (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. The tools and companies I cited are all in the development and documentation tool business. And I forgot IBM and Eclipse, which also supports Sun and Linux. They all have in common that the tools are free (for all platforms), and that they are huge both by size and by feature set. netbeans and Eclipse probably dwarf any MPLAB version so far (otoh the Cypress PsoC development environment is huge and so is Atmels latest). > Again, MCU industry is a different world. You have to use MCUs for your > project > and basically none of them offer a Linux software package, especially in the > lower-end 8bit/16bit world. So you can not avoid them. True, none of those that have no released programming specs at the binary and interface level (e.g. usb interface, as pickit 2 etc), have any serious open source support. However, those which have this interface released, are supported 100% by open source and other third party (many free or low cost) suppliers. This includes almost all the popular old architectures. There are dozens of tools for MCS51, Z80, even oldies like i8085 are supported, and all it ever cost the makers was, to release the full binary spec needed for development. And this does not seem to cause any trouble to companies which supply $manyK tools for the same architecture (like Keil f.ex.). Because in a truly free market competition in the price and features (and liability/insurance) areas fixes these problems by itself, with each product reaching its relevant level pretty soon, and then evolving from there as it is improved (or not). The situation where new architectures or variations thereof appear every 6 months or so is untenable for normal tool development. I think that nobody can afford to write and debug a modern GUI IDE in 6 months as a 'side business' and give the result away for free, with the exception of the ... open source community, which does just exactly that, anyway. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist