On April 21, Richard Erlacher wrote:
> You can get the same software for UNIX, if you don't mind the $250K pricetag.
> You won't get the source code there, either, of course, but I doubt you'd
> expend 200 man-years developing a piece of software at your expense and then
> give away the source code. If you did, your shareholders would tar and
> feather you.
Most of the software in use in the UNIX world is free. Of course
there ARE commercial packages, but...with very few exceptions, for
every commercial package there's at least one free one that does the
job as well or better. It's possible that I'm preaching to the choir
here, but one of the common misconceptions that really bugs me is the
notion that "unix == expensive", when in reality it's just the
opposite. (The same goes for "pc vs. real computers" in the "I use a
PC because I can't afford a Sun or an Alpha" case...)
> People like the software for FPGA's and CPLD's because it's either free or
> under $100 US. There are so many high-quality 805x compilers that are
FPGA and CPLD stuff are some of the exceptions that I mentioned in
my paragraph above. For that stuff we're pretty much stuck with
Windows due to the shortsightedness of the vendors. There's nothing
we can do about that at this point, as far as I can tell. :-( I curb
that problem by using Windows (under an emulator of course) ONLY for
the stuff that I can't run under a real OS.
> "freeware" or "shareware" that I can't see any reason one would want one of
> the $2000 types, unless he was convinced he could make his work easier by
> spending that money. If people would keep after the producers of the
> purportedly faulty software, it would get fixed. Vendors of shoddy software
> rely on the fact that people buy their products under the mistaken notion that
> it will do their work for them, knowing that, when the end-user finds out it's
> not so, he'll be too embarassed to complain that the product doesn't work any
> better than the comparable freeware product.
I agree 100%. Needless to say, we're trashing this compiler after
this project. :-) The fancy GUI is nice, but frankly I can be more
productive with xemacs and make.
> There is a demo version of nearly every high-cost ($2000 isn't that high, btw,
> though the Windows environment has made it so.) Get a comparable product for
> UNIX, and you'll get no improvement, nor will you get source. All you'll get
> is a bigger bill.
Not necessarily...I've used at least four FREE 8051 C compilers under
UNIX, nearly ten years ago! $2000 *is* high, when most of the 8051
compilers I've used cost $0.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire "Mmmm. Big."
St. Petersburg, FL -Den
Received on Sun Apr 21 2002 - 11:37:15 BST