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. They are all development tool and documentation tool companies. They support several architectures. And there is also IBM with Eclipse. They are all huge packages, cross platform, free and actively developed, with new versions coming out about once per year. > 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. None of the architectures that have no released binary interface data have serious Linux or open source (e.g. BSD) support. Conversely, those that do have published specs do have support. Mostly third party, almost always free and almost always open source. >From the market/competition point of view, for well-established architectures like f.ex. the MCS51, there are dozens of third party tools, open source and not (even C compilers - although MCS51 is about as hard to write a compiler for as a PIC is). Yet, established tool makers (like Keil for example) compete here, and have >$1K tools and they sell, and they are not bitching about 'open source destroying their business' because it does not, they have a good product and it sells. And that particular architecture is like 30 years old (and *nix is 40 or so). THIS is what 'open market' means. Of course it would be nice if there would be a binary static version of a Keil compiler that would run on Linux or BSD, to avoid rebooting, but that is not the point. Peter -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist