Sorry but I think Raisonance products (on
That was for my $.02 only. Bruno
IAR did not want to help us with an older version of their IDE.
With the "new and improved" version, our builds broke. ( don't remember why any more)
We went round and round to find the problem. After a year or so, it was decided to stay with the older version.
We still support our older products, IAR does not.
A new engineer (me) started and we needed to transfer our only working compiler to a new machine.
With the years "YEARs" of communication about our plight, we had to start all over again, "AGAIN".
"Why are you still using this old compiler" was the only response we would get from the kids in tech support.
Checking some old emails, we contacted the only engineer at IAR who remembered our problem, he moved up to some management position ( good for him).
A few emails later, we had our solution and got the license transfer.
Four weeks of fooling around to get what was able to be done the whole time. The new tech support kids, could not figure it out.
I will use IAR and other locked software in the future.
But this fiasco showed me the dark side of locked/licensed software.
donald
I tried that once. It didn't work. To be fair after complaining in this forum a representative claimed it should have been possible and offered to look into it, but by then I'd already gone through the pain of the workaround.
I have.
Robert
Perhaps. But most copy protection I've experienced seriously impacts well-intentioned, paying customers (me.) I've discussed some of the issues in fair detail before and I know you've already read them, so I'm under no illusion that anything I'll say will change your mind on this. But suffice if that I tend to believe that those vendors who choose to injure their customers and place them at risk in order to protect themselves from perceived risks by 3rd parties, who are obviously neither the intended customer nor the vendor, will tend to find themselves with _less_, not _more_, revenue over the long haul.
How would you feel about marrying someone who had been burned a dozen times in the past and decided that you need to sign an iron-clad contract because of all that prior "baggage," about which you had no part at all? Frankly, there is some measure of trust to be expected in any truly healthy relationship. It goes both ways. Those who spend a lot of effort guarding themselves against the perceived and real harms of the world around them will often find themselves more isolated, if also more protected. Locking yourself in a room does protect you from being mugged on the street. But it is no way to live life and it's lonely there.
Just my opinion.
Jon
I understand the principle of wanting to protect your software, but I wonder how much this is based on reality. Software producers and resellers are fond of estimating illegal copies and claiming loses equivalent to full purchase price per illegal copy.
The very term "piracy" (invented by Microsoft - a company that always encouraged that attitude that they'd rather you used an illegal copy of
*their* software than a legal copy of someone else's software) is designed to invoke irrational and totally disproportional fear of illegal copying.The fact is that in most western countries, companies would normally pay honestly for their business software. There will be some exceptions, but most people prefer honesty when they can manage it. Most of those today who use copied software could not afford to pay for it (a $5000 dollar program might be a minor expense in the west - in some countries, it would pay several salaries) - so their choice regarding expensive packages is copied software or no software. In other words, a top-tier vendor like IAR or Kiel loses little from illegal copies - the users would never have paid the full price anyway.
The people that really lose out from illegal copying are the small middle-tier vendors, along with open source developers (sometimes they sell support, and even if no money changes hands, users are still important). If a small-time developer wants a good AVR compiler, he might consider IAR (excellent code, high price), ImageCraft (user friendly, medium quality, low price) and avr-gcc (harder to use, excellent code, zero price). If he can't afford IAR, then obviously one of the other two would be a better choice. But if he can get hold of a copy of IAR for nothing, it is very tempting - whereas with ImageCraft's prices, he would probably have paid up honestly.
The cost of enforcing licensing systems is large. I doubt if there is anyone here who has used licensing systems and never had trouble with it. It doesn't take too many days wasted from fighting licensing systems, or waiting for registrations, before you've thrown away more money than the software cost in the first place. Vendors have whole departments whose job is nothing but helping people with licensing problems - how much of a waste is that? And of course there is the customer relations loss of a business model which assumes your customers are criminals and thieves until proved otherwise.
It may well be that dongled software is the right model overall for development tool vendors, but sometimes I wonder if their assumptions about copying and customer honesty are based on reality.
Op Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:58:34 +0200 schreef Frank Bemelman :
Plonk! (for being an etiquette nazi).
-- Gemaakt met Opera's revolutionaire e-mailprogramma: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Keil is about to die. But how about the first ever 8051 C-compiler?
-- Gemaakt met Opera's revolutionaire e-mailprogramma: http://www.opera.com/mail/
In article , Jonathan Kirwan writes
Sadly pre-nuptual agreements are quite common.
-- \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\ \/\/\/\/\ Chris Hills Staffs England /\/\/\/\/ /\/\/ chris@phaedsys.org www.phaedsys.org \/\/\ \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
In article , Boudewijn Dijkstra writes
Highly unlikely. Why would ARM kill it? The Keil 8051 and C166 are stable and mature products. I can see they may not do much more development but I can't see them disappearing.... They are a good revenue stream.
What makes you thing Keil is about to disappear?
Even if Keil/ARM push the Cortex in favour of the 166, the 51 market will still continue.
The IAR 51 compiler is now on a par with the Keil for size and speed optimisation in general.
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"Boudewijn Dijkstra" schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@ragnarok.lan...
And Plonk! for having a problem with that.
-- Thanks, Frank. (remove 'q' and '.invalid' when replying by email)
Public plonking: The usenet equivalent of a child putting his fingers in his ears, stamping his feet, humming and yelling, "I can't hear you".
schreef in bericht news: snipped-for-privacy@i42g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I have a low treshold, my kill file is very large. From time to time we see people complaining about top posting, and quite frankly I don't understand why they bother to explain why. Top posters are all idiots and belong in a kill file. There is absolutely nothing to be learned from top posters, they have already shown their stupidity by top posting. So, in the kill file they go. If my reader had an option to do that automatically, I would turn it on.
The only case where top posting is unavoidable and allowed, is when someone *starts* a thread. That is bad enough as it is ;)
-- Thanks, Frank. (remove 'q' and '.invalid' when replying by email)
" In other words, a top-tier vendors loses little from illegal copies - the users would never have paid the full price anyway. " This may actually be true but piracy actually hurts the industry over all. Following your example where you explain correctly that many software tools are expensive and unaffordable to many developers.
" But if he can get hold of a copy of IAR for nothing, it is very tempting - whereas with ImageCraft's prices, he would probably have paid up honestly." The real problem is if he can get a copy of IAR he doesn't buy from Image Craft. The industry loses its incentive (and resources) to invest in developing and supporting new products. Pirates lose as well, they don't have access to support for new processor family members and product updates and at the development's end don't have access to the very people that have the product expertise to help them with development questions and experience. This results in products that take longer to develop and market.
Compiler development is a labour intensive industry by very skilled people providing products that service a small market. We have looked very closely at the issues around piracy and it is rarely an issue of price. We have not found piracy to have a price threshold. In David's example it is just as likely that ImageCraft's products would have been pirated as well as IAR's by the same individuals.
__ Walter Banks Byte Craft Limited
That doesn't mean you'd want to embroil yourself in someone else's own personal baggage, who is also already planning out how to handle the eventual irreconcilable incompatibilities.
One faces enough very real, unforeseen problems in life so as to want to avoid starting out taking a path already beset with other, very real and visible ones. Especially if there is any choice in the matter.
Jon
... snip ...
That is not necessarily so. Many top-posters do it because a) They have seen others doing it; b) They are influenced by evil newsreaders, such as Outhouse Excess, which encourage it; c) They are uninformed newbies.
Simply plonking them without advising them of the fact does nothing to correct them. In many cases they simply will not learn, but enough come around and learn the basics of netiquette to make training attempts worthwhile. IMNSHO, at least. It is analagous to teaching children table manners.
However there is at least one thing to be said for your technique: it certainly reduces the apparent traffic on the newsgroup. :-)
-- Some informative links: news:news.announce.newusers http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
"Rudeness is the weak man's imitation of strength."
You're way too kind. A), B) and C) are all proof of stupidity.
It's a method of traffic management/reducement too, I admit. There's still enough material left to enjoy.
-- Thanks, Frank. (remove 'q' and '.invalid' when replying by email)
users would never have paid the full price anyway. " This may actually be true but piracy actually hurts the industry over all. Following your example where you explain
developers.
whereas with ImageCraft's prices, he would probably have paid up honestly." The real problem is if he can get a copy of IAR he doesn't buy from Image Craft. The industry loses
products. Pirates lose as well, they don't have access to support for new processor family members and product updates and at the development's end don't have access to the very
and experience. This results in products that take longer to develop and market.
providing products that service a small market. We have looked very closely at the issues around piracy and it is rarely an issue of price. We have not found piracy to have a price
would have been pirated as well as IAR's by the same individuals.
I understand that compiler development is expensive, and to make a business you must either sell large numbers, or (if your markets are smaller, or your costs higher due to greater development costs) charge higher prices. I'm also aware that lower priced packages are illegally copied just as higher priced packages are. I'm just considering the grey area customer, between the entirely honest purchaser and the entirely dishonest user who sees an illegal copy as perfectly justified.
I don't really know how this sort of thing (using an illegal copy of expensive software rather than legally purchased cheaper alternatives) actually occurs in the market of embedded development tools. I know it has occurred in the much larger markets of office tools - so many people (especially at home, or in small businesses) have had easy access to illegal free copies of MS Office, combined with "justifications" (MS have so much money anyway...), that the once-viable market for cheaper alternative office suites is virtually non-existent. The market is totally dominated by the one big player (legal or not), and truly free alternatives.
My point was not that dongles or other protection systems are necessarily bad - merely that they are not necessarily good or helpful for development tool companies, and I hope they think clearly through the basis of their decisions, and the consequences. From contact with Walter Banks (of Byte Craft) and Richard Mann (of ImageCraft), I know that these two companies take such matters seriously, and work with their customers to make sure the protection systems have as little impact as possible. I also know of companies which seem to take a perverse delight in making life as hard as possible for people to actually use their products. It is a shame indeed that protection systems needs to be an issue at all when considering product purchases.
Does the number of people who would pirate a manufacturer's software tools if they were not protected outweigh the number of people who are going elsewhere because they are? I don't think anyone can answer that, and that's the central issue development tool companies must grapple with. If they thought pirated copies gained them sales, as was the case with the old borland products, and is the foundation upon which Microsoft's empire is built, I don't think the rest of us would need to factor protection systems into the equation of whose development tools to purchase.
Cheers, Alf
providing
have
Having provided Forth compilers for 25 years, I make two observations
1) You'll always get ripped off, 2) According to some people, the "best" price is half that of the lowest cost product on the market.Now that gcc and friends have reduced the acquisition cost of C compilers to zero, you will always bleed.
Stephen
-- Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com MicroProcessor Engineering Ltd - More Real, Less Time 133 Hill Lane, Southampton SO15 5AF, England tel: +44 (0)23 8063 1441, fax: +44 (0)23 8033 9691 web: http://www.mpeforth.com - free VFX Forth downloads
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