Hello,
Keil support did not reply yet - but am I correct in assuming that RL-ARM is now a part of MDK, and that each user needs to have a RL-ARM license paid for separately in order to be able to use FlashFS/TCPNet etc. (many samples in MDK 4.20 are broken, but the one that I did manage to compile failed to link complaining that my license is insufficient - that did not happen with MDK 4.14 !) ? If so, this is a HUGE expense. If my boss asks for my opinion (and I think he will) - we're going open source!
So Keil is increasing the prices until they have only one customer they need to give support to. Then one day, they don't have that customer either. Clever.
Keil, an ARM company. Keil, a "get an arm and a leg" company.
Per,
You posted:
'Keil, a "get an arm and a leg" company'
I would comfortably say: "Keil, a "get a brain company" ! I like their tools. There are great - sure.
But Keil/ARM marketing please read this: WE CANNOT PAY 8000 EUROS PER SEAT. WE CANNOT. THERE IS NO MONEY - DO YOU UNDERSTAND=? THERE IS NO MONEY FOR THIS! For god's safe, we can emply a freelancer to upgrade open source code for that money! In the mean time, I have uIP and probably also FatFS to replace TCPNet and FlashFS.
Keil - you guys are geniuses. I kid you not.
They don't understand that the dam will break sometime; this price increase is simple extortion without any functional justification. None whatsoever! But my life is easy: My boss is a careful business man. He insturcted the head of engineering to get rid of FlashFS/TCPNet even with the previous price after I drew his attention to the open source option.
Are you reading this ARM/Keil support/marketing? Do you understand that you are missing a client? Or are we not big enough for you to care?
I agree somewhat with what you are saying but have you addressed this directly to Keil Sales? Bradford
"'Keil, a "get an arm and a leg" company'
I would comfortably say: "Keil, a "get a brain company" !"
It's a "Get an arm and a leg from each of our customers" company.
There is no seminal doubt in my mind that they won't even bother to pick up the phone or pass an email to somebody that matters. Do you really believe some oligarchical pharaoh that happens to be a sales guy for Keil/ARM will even notice a small company with 6 or 7 MDK licenses? No people, it's won't be happening. The only option is to take of ourselves: find other solutions that don't stem creativity and productivity.
ARM's stated aim in acquiring Keil was to encourage the migration from 8/16-bit processors (for which Keil were famous) to ARM (for which, at the time, they weren't).
One of the key perceived barriers to migration from 8/16-bit to 32-bit processors is the tool cost - Keil seem to be working hard to reinforce this perception!
ARM's whole Cortex-M0/3 push is also aimed at winning ground from 8/16-bit processors - this pricing strategy cannot possibly help that!
Very acceptable results are now achievable with free GCC/Eclipse-based tools - Keil need to be really careful that they don't price themselves out of the market...
Andy,
You are entirely right. Think of this: A typical Cortex M0 chips costs 1 euro. Why should a development tool cost 4200 times the hardware? Again - if somebody from is reading this - we don't mind paying, OK? We don't mind paying. But there are prices and there are prices, and I, for one, am getting the feeling that it is not worth the money. As I stated above, I have free of charge working alternatives for Keil's stuff that are used and reviewed by thousands of people from all over the world - why pay, then? I can even get rid of of RTX by porting FreeRTOS to LPC1700/1800 family. Oh, yeah.
We are currently stretched with developers, but for our latest ARM chip addition, we did go for gcc since we already had enough working code to get it to boot and with gcc we can rotate the workload on more developers without having to tell a customer that we want a very premium tool fee to activate one more resource. Extra problematic since in some situations, our customers wants to be able to write their own additional software for our products and they are often selling to few units on their own to be able to afford the Keil tools.
For one or two other products, we have been looking into porting the existing code to be able to license the software to some of our customers, allowing them to create own rebranded variantes while letting them handle their own feature extensions.
“The Keil tools are focused on microcontrollers, and we are happy to support the GNU tool chain,” said York. “Code Red is building a low-cost tool chain based on the GNU tools. There are other tools coming up later this year [2009] that I cannot discuss. We want to do things that fit into the MPU world.”
www.electronicsweekly.com/.../arms-cortex-m0-processor-how-it-works.htm
That's dated 04 March 2009 - so "coming up later this year" should be well-established by now?
Tamir, I totally agree
IT IS A DAMNED SHAME
There are prices that can be accepted as reasonable (imo Keil always was close to or a bit above this limit) And there are prices that make you feel like an idiot or being mugged if you pay them. What a pity if this all really becomes true. But I fear it already is. We all know there are engineers that want to earn a living and work hard and well (mostly) and we ARE WILLING TO PAY.
Andy, I think you should not put a CPU and its development tool into a price relation. Just imagine the functionality a 6502 had and now look at LPC17xx. If you then put the inflation to the prices, they are (were) acceptable at a much higher level of complexity compared to the 8 bit tools that were damn expensive too.
I think the guys at ARM must be COMPLETELY NUTS. (btw ARM in German means POOR and they really seem to be short of sales brains there) Why not increase the core licenses by a 1/1000 .....
So yes, I am interested in hints for alternatives as well. Up to now, I managed to get around Eclipse, because I am not world's biggest Java fan ;)
Somehow, Keil haven't realized that the amount of code in a project doesn't reflect the size of the budget a company has.
Per, you are so right. And no, we all do not sell millions of units a year .... so development tool costs do matter.
If I was force to bet, I'd say they want to become attractive to realize a higher price when acquired by Apple and then "Keil" is going to end line Qt did at Nokia
Idiots ............
I remember a phone call with a sales person in Munich last summer / early fall. (VERY friendly btw) They already knew that some major changes were to come and suggested early updates.
Like it or not, it is a fact of life!
It is a commonly stated reason by people "stuck" with an 8-bit processor who say they can't afford to move to a (better-suited) 32-bit processor "because the tools are too expensive"
A thing with Keil's ARM tools is that they cover everything from the smallest Cortex-M0 to the hugest ARM-9.
Maybe Keil need to consider a low-cost "lite" version for the low-end Cortex-Mx; eg, with microlib only, no floating point, etc...?
I've started a discussion in the ARM-Based Group at Linkedin:
www.linkedin.com/.../Has-Keil-lost-plot-on-85447.S.47395661
"Sources close to ARM" suggest that this thread has been noticed...