Re: KEil bought by ARM


Chris Hills wrote:

> Though it can take weeks to finding the old versions of Open source
> compilers and especially getting all the right parts.

Ah, the fatal flaw in my reasoning. Wouldn't it be fantastic if a
gifted engineer could devise some magical technology whereby the
sourcecode tarball I download today could be stored in some fashion
against the possibility that I might require it in the future. I guess
we'll just have to wait for someone to invent some such device. I
envisage it could take the form of a rotating cylinder of wax with a
solenoid-driven stylus to write data and a floating stylus for
readback. I already have a black-and-white dog to look askance at the
audio output horn of this appliance:
<http://www.dogster.com/pet_page.php?i=163050&PHPSESSID=bfc5ad8d08ee7fd89b93b5ada84ba026>
(my wife maintains this page, by the way - I disclaim all
responsibility, except that it's my hand feeding him the Starbucks
madeleine cake).

> With commercial compilers you can usually get the original vendor to
> provide the right version overnight. I have myself provided specific

ROFL!!!!! Some vendors, maybe - Rowley, for instance. Did you ever try
to do this with, say, IAR? How about OrCAD? My employer is a
multi-billion-dollar Fortune 50 company, and we certainly never got
that level of support out of them. Just how big does one have to be in
order to see these legendary levels of support?

Let me summarize my experiences in pithy, yet supremely apposite terms:

* If you lose your dongle, you are fucked. $Multi-K for the latest
compiler version. Oh, and you'll have to port and requalify all your
code.

* If you upgrade your machines and the dongle doesn't work with your
new hardware, you are fucked. $Multi-K for the latest compiler version.
Oh, and you'll have to port and requalify all your code.

* If you upgrade your compiler and have to return the dongle as part of
the upgrade process, and then find that you need to recompile some old
code with the old compiler, you are fucked. Either port all your code
or hunt eBay. Or go to one of those Russian or Greek websites and pay
EUR50 for a CD-ROM with thirty different cracked compiler versions on
it. Naturally, the BSA and any certifying authorities (UL, for
instance) won't mind that you're using a pirated, cracked compiler to
build life-critical firmware.

* If the vendor goes belly-up or is acquired by someone who has a
vested interest in migrating customers to some new platform, you are
fucked. Might as well rewrite your code from scratch rather than try to
analyze all the idiosyncrasies of the old and new platforms and get it
all working happily.

* If you point out to the compiler vendor that they are costing you
thousands of dollars in engineering time, you are not merely fucked
vigorously but actively flogged and drenched in brine during the
process - a sensation I don't happen to relish, though I understand
it's quite popular in certain circles.

That lovely old oft-quoted comment about the British Navy ("a hotbed of
buggery and the lash") is an utterly accurate description of what it's
like to live with proprietary, copy-protected tools.

> some years ago, than pick up from the compiler vendor an exact version
> of commercial SW.

.... that likely as not will not function on contemporary operating
systems due to dongle issues.

> Your illustration falls over when you compare like with like. If you
> have the source (or executables) for the old SW then the problems are
> the same. Unless you are suggesting that the old compiler SW is that old
> that it will not run on modern OS?

The compilers will generally run just fine when cracked. It's the
copy-protection that works actively to defeat any sane form of
development system archival. And challenge-response registration
systems are just as bad, by the way - because they route your urgent
issues back through the nexus of a [potentially nonexistent] compiler
vendor who has a vested interest in forcing you to spend on an upgrade.

> source compiler re-built for the later OS? I assume you compiled it with
> the same compiler used originally? if you rebuilt it with a newer

Yes!

.

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