On Mon, 6 Jul 2009 17:58:17 -0400, you wrote:

>On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 1:14 PM, Michael
>Rigby-Jones<Michael.Rigby-Jones@oclaro.com> wrote:
>> Almost, but not quite. =A0Are you suggesting they should give away a
>> compiler that has no restrictions whatsoever?
>>
>
>Actually, I would say yes. I have never understood companies who
>expect customers to buy, for a few hundred USD, a tool which simply
>makes it easier for that same customer to buy more product. It's
>almost like charging me to come into the store or charging me to "buy"
>ads or a catalog. Microchip is in the business of selling ICs, not
>software. Their compiler cannot be used to write code for competitor's
>micros, so it is an ideal "loss leader" to get you to buy more micros
>from Microchip.
>
>Even when it comes to hobbyists/students, many of them turn into
>engineers eventually. It would be very helpful to plant the seed of
>familiarity with your ICs, which is much more likely to happen when
>you allow them free access to quality software tools to use your ICs.
>
>Sean

Many vendors have taken the approach of a free, unsupported  code-limited v=
ersion, which means you
have full access to all the optimisations, while not losing sales to users =
doing larger projects for
whom the compiler cost is a small portion of overall dev costs. =


The FPGA/CPLD guys also discovered this a while ago. Some of you may be old=
 enough to remember when
entry costs for pretty much any PLD/FPGA development was well over $1K ( no=
t counting palasm, which
was the assembler of its time) =


I'd argue that these days, providing a free, reasonably performing C compil=
er is as essential a
sales  to a micro vendor as an assembler was 10 years ago. =

Somewhat more so when the chip you are selling has such a compiler-unfriend=
ly architecture that open
source compilers are unlikely to become a viable option as all sorts of ver=
y specific tweaks are
needed to get good performance. =


Compare with Atmel, where GCC is useable and there are also free code-limit=
ed professional quality
tools (e.g. IAR).

The optimistic view is that Microchip bought Hitech so they could provide a=
 decent free compiler,
and they will soon realise that  the way Hitech differentiatied free/paid-f=
or products is likely to
be actively damaging to them and change to a free code-limited (I'd be happ=
y with 4K) version. =

  =


-- =

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