AVR Compiler Recommendations

No. A large number of important compilers for various architectures (RVCT, Intel C++, XLC, etc.) are protected via FlexLM which is not known for being that hard to crack if you know what you are doing. It's a keep the honest honest tool really.

You are not buying the complier in the sense of paying for its development, you are buying the IDE, the debugger and support. In any case it is a common misconception that open source means free as in money. Even the FSF sell a compiled up suite of their tools for the platform of your choice for kilobucks if you don't care to compile them up yourself.

-p

This becomes quite problematic if you have to support your product for, say, 10 years.

There is a great risk that the compiler vendor goes bankrupt or is bought by a competitor who kills the product line. To avoid such problems, the source code and documentation is sometimes stored by a trusted third party and is available only if the vendor is not able to fulfill their obligations.

A vendor in liquidation has sometimes been bought by a large customer to secure the supply of vital services.

Even if the vendor remains in business, it should provide a 24 x 7 service for any copy protection problems due to different time zones and different cultural weekly rest systems (Friday/Saturday/Sunday).

Even if a replacement dongle is available at a short notice from the vendor, how do you transport it to the other side of the world literally into the jungle ? While some international carrier may be able to deliver it to the correct country, you may have to hire a helicopter to deliver it to the site in the jungle or the Siberian taiga.

For these reasons, I try to avoid any products with dongles or other awkward copy protection systems.

Paul

In article , Paul Keinanen writes

This is always possible but you do not need the source code for that.

They do. Though I think you mean "normal business hours" for any given time zone. You try getting support for PC's, cars, Tv's bank's, etc etc out side local working hours. You are inventing flimsy problems. That said most compiler vendors have web forums now and usually you can get support from other users on the Internet in NG's just like GNU.

If you are talking about a specific implementation of GNU you will find that the companies that do them will also only work normal business hours. They have lives and families too.

Or the Siberian tundra? Its not to difficult. I have done that. A parallel port dongle (not IAR) for an outfit who were doing some installation work and trials in Siberia. Their ONLY link was sat phone so they could not get any Internet support.

Did similar for an outfit doing vehicle trials the middle of the Canadian outback. Allegedly.

I am currently supplying a very old version of a compiler to one customer and sorting out some node locked compilers where there has been a hard disk crash for another.

You pre plan.

The same applies to vehicle parts, computers, etc when working out in the middle of nowhere.

BTW your GNU theory falls down as well. How do you reinstall the GNu compiler if the hard disk crashes? I can's see HP or Dell doing a 4 hour turnaround to the jungle.

I get the impression the open source community here KNOW the answer and will use any argument no matter how unlikely to fit their [ religious ] convictions about open source. It is the only thing that accounts for the sort of arguments you see here.

Sure, right (to the "they do" comment). It took us a week of discussions about versions, serial numbers, activation numbers, installation codes, verification codes, code codes, (...) to get our copy of Hitech PIC C reactivated after we moved it from one engineer's machine to another. Two engineers were idling for a week; that's $6,800. Where's my check from Hitech?

Banks? Show me a single bank that doesn't have a 24-hour support number for urgent problems like a stolen ATM card. Similar level of urgency.

A car can be fixed - probably - at any independent service center. Some of these are open 24/7. When something goes wrong with a proprietary compiler, you have to take it to the dealership.

So you are now saying that the support for GNU tools is provided in the same places, at the same quality level or better, as payware tools? Payware tool vendors are starting to discover that people need the support that has hitherto only been available for GNU users? Excellent, I thought you would never come around to our way of thinking.

ROFL. Like I said, things look different when you're sitting on the right hand of God. I work at a company with a market cap in the billions of dollars and [though not in my division] numerous important military projects. These issues are real for us. How big does a company have to be to fall outside your definition of lunatic fringe hobbyists, then?

If you don't have the source codes, how would you fix for instance incompatibilities with future OS versions.

I said 24 x 7 since at a large system startup phase people work more or less around the clock on site.

I am only referring to support for problems caused by any copy protection system. With GNU you do not need support for copy protection, since copy protection would not exist for GNU software.

How many days does it take to deliver a replacement dongle etc. to such places.

Yes, you have to preplan by buying extra dongles as spares just in case some might break in the middle of nowhere.

Alternatively you refuse to use products for which you can not get a corporate license without the copy protection.

I have nothing against good commercial software and I do not have any special affection for open source, but if you can not get a commercial software without all the hassle associated with copy protection (e.g. as a corporate license without the hassle), I would be actively searching for other products.

Paul

By saving the OS version as well.

I keep an old laptop alive with Windows 95, just to be able to run my Pascal MT+ compiler on a CP/M emulator (ZRUN) which needs an OS that supports FCB's instead of file handles.

Meindert

In article , Paul Keinanen writes

Outside India it is not common.

Less than the 30/45 days the full eval versions run when you reinstall from CD. They don't need a dongle or node lock

That can happen but from personal experience other things are more of a problem,

So that lets in all the main commercial compilers then.

Vehicle parts, computers, etc., are all commodity items that can be easily purchased in most modern towns. Replacement dongles for specialist software is a completely different matter.

You can borrow or buy another computer - perhaps not in the middle of a jungle, but not far off it. With a tools like winavr (or customer-friendly commercial tools like ImageCraft), you are a download away from being up and running again.

You are the only one who has this impression, and I don't know where you get it. Most people here believe in choosing the right tool for the right job, according to how it best fits their requirement. Sometimes open source software fits it best, sometimes not - it depends on your requirements and priorities. If your place high priority on the availability of tools in the future, their portability to current and future machines, your guaranteed ability to fix or modify the tools (obviously dependant on your time and money), and your ability to run them despite problems in licensing hardware or software, then you are strongly pushed towards open source solutions. If that's not your highest priority, you can consider other options. The only person in this discussion who is arguing on the basis of irrational (religious?) prejudices is the one whose blind faith in the hearts of gold selling high-end commercial tools leads him to reject open source solutions outright.

In article , Meindert Sprang writes

The other problem is you can NOT recreate the old version of the GNU compiler without the original source AND the original compiler that compiled it, running on the same OS and hardware..... Having just the sources is not enough.

Having the binary is better. But then you can get that for all the commercial compilers anyway. Besides they usually unprotected the old versions when the supply them.

Basically if comes down to religion and how you deal with your tools suppliers. If you are hostile with them it is not surprising that the don't fall over themselves to help.

Hi David

Thanks for the email...... is there something you are not telling us on this NG? :-)

In message , david_brown writes

of

you

response

In article , larwe writes

You seem to have a lot trouble with most of your tools suppliers... yet each of them has many thousands of happy customers.

Then you need to move back to the real world.

One person. Perhaps it is just the way you deal with people?

I'd have to agree with Lewin on this one. I've had experiences like that with almost every tool vendor that used some sort of node-locking or activation scheme. Another fun one is when you need a bug-fix so you have have to purchase an upgrade to the latest version and the vendor has no record of you purchasing the product, so they demand that you buy another full license. They claim they lost a lot of their customer records, so I'm just screwed. Nice.

About 7 years ago I vowed never to use a dongle or node-locked tool if there was any possible alternative. Though I find open-source tools to be better supported and easier to use, I'm still willing to use use commercial tools (even ones with serial numbers and activation codes) as long as I'm free to move the product from one machine to another.

People see themselves in others. IMO, a vendor thinks I'm out to screw them because they're out to screw me.

Hey!! I thought I already had the exclusive rights to this deal. I want my ingots back!!!

You said in the middle of nowhere... now it is a modern town.

A dongle can be with you in 48 hours usually if it is a modern town. But I have 30 days to deliver.

You are changing the argument from Jungle to modern town. Besides your argument is wrong. MANY consumer parts and car parts can take weeks for spears to arrive..

Download from where? You mean a modern city with a broad band link You don't need a dongle for the 30/45 day eva, versions and a month is enough time to get a gongle anywhere on the planet. Or of course email node lock keys. Actually you can do that over the phone even a sat phone.

Strangely two other people on different continents said the same thing to me today that the open source community is religious, blinkered and fanatical.

My own personal disaster story happened a few years/jobs ago when I was asked to reinstall & run a very expensive Unix memory verification tool (a la Purify) that was locked to either the hard disk or MAC address of the system to which it was originally licensed. (Can't remember which.)

The company providing this tool had been bought several times, and the current IP owner had killed that product line, integrating the technology into other products.

I was very lucky that in that I finally got it to work, but it took more than 1 and half month just to find who was the tool's owner plus two weeks until locating somebody in that organization that could provide a new installation key.

If possible, I will avoid these schemes like the plague. If not possible, I would quarantine the plague inside a VMWare virtual machine, that can be ported to another system without outside assistance.

You've seen all of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister, I take it? Do you feel a kinship with Nigel Hawthorne?

Remember that episode of Yes, Minister where the DAA is covering up some horrific systematic waste (I think the episode title was The Greasy Pole) and Hacker asks Humphrey how to respond to the accusations?

Humphrey replies that they should simply use one of the five standard Civil Service responses, one of which is "There's a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything, but security forbids its disclosure".

Deja vu.

Trust

Ah, you've caught me out.

I also make tractors in my spare time.

mvh.,

David Brown.

I've heard your theory here before, and it is still rubbish. Properly written tools (such as gcc) can be compiled on any supported architecture (32-bit or 64-bit, big-endian or little-endian) and operating system, and will produce the same results from any of them, regardless of the compiler version used or its flags. People do this all the time - the tools are primarily distributed as source code!

Being able to freely copy the binary to different machines is not better in any way (and of course, you are also free to copy the binaries of your open source tools, rendering your argument invalid even if there had been a factual basis). It is most certainly better than a locked binary that can't be moved at all, but it is not enough. I've seen software that failed to run on modern computers because they are too fast (such as old versions of Microchip's mpasm, which refused to run on computers faster than about 200 MHz until the binary was hacked and patched). Old DOS or 16-bit windows binaries cannot run on Win64, and will not run on other future windows versions - so your old binaries won't run on newer machines (unless, of course, you use open source software such as DosBox, FreeDOS, or Wine).

Commercial suppliers might on occasion provide you with an unlocked older version of their software if you can persuade them to - but the economics and practicality are very much against it.

I think a lot of us here have their war stories from battling protection schemes and unhelpful suppliers - I know I have. And I think most people here would at least start off polite and respectful when dealing with the suppliers - it's not unreasonable to get a little irritated when you find that your supplier is insisting you buy a full new license just because your dongle broke (or whatever your problem happens to be).

Um have you not heard of compiler convergence? The standard method of building GCC recompiled itself with itself during the build process. It doesn't matter what the original compiler was the result will always be the same.

Incidently any commerical compiler worth its salt will be able to converge itself as well. The exceptions being compiler for some embedded architectures where it would simply be too slow.

Having long expericence of such things most commerical companies can't even rebuild old versions of their products let along remove copy protection from them.

No it doesn't. It comes down to requirements and the ability of the vendor to meet those requirements. If you choose open or closed tools to fulfill those requirements is another question.

You can buy commerical tools with a 10 year support program and source escrow and you can buy commerical tools which the vendor won't be able to rebuild six months from now.

You can also obtain open source tools which you will be able to rebuild 10 years from now and obtain open source tools which probably will be significant hassle to rebuild next year.

-p