MDK 4.20 trouble

Dear All,

I would like to address your concerns and clarify the facts around the MDK products.

Pricing.
There is no plan to increase the price of RL-ARM to €4,190 (23%).

As you have seen we have removed RL-ARM as a stand-alone product and integrated it into MDK-Professional. Based on the MDK-Professional price which you have highlighted in this thread, this represents a small price increase (<7%) over the previous combined pricing of MDK-ARM and RL-ARM. This is the only price increase we have made for a number of years even though we have been adding many new features in MDK and RL-ARM. For instance MDK-Professional now includes USB Host and NAND support.

We have also made a special offer as part of its introduction, all MDK-Professionals shipped before 30th September, 2011 include a ULINKpro at no extra cost.

There are other MDK Editions available (Standard, Basic and Lite) which are priced to allow developers to use the most suitable version for their requirements. MDK-Basic has actually reduced in price.

MDK-Professional includes extensive middleware libraries which are a fraction of the cost of similar products available from other commercial RTOS and middleware vendors.

Licensing
RL-ARM has always been licensed on a per seat basis. Every developer using MDK and RL-ARM should have a full license for both. This is clearly defined in the click-through End User License Agreement. Therefore, MDK-Professional does not make any change to the correct usage of the middleware components.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Mark Onions
ARM

Dear All,

I would like to address your concerns and clarify the facts around the MDK products.

Pricing.
There is no plan to increase the price of RL-ARM to €4,190 (23%).

As you have seen we have removed RL-ARM as a stand-alone product and integrated it into MDK-Professional. Based on the MDK-Professional price which you have highlighted in this thread, this represents a small price increase (<7%) over the previous combined pricing of MDK-ARM and RL-ARM. This is the only price increase we have made for a number of years even though we have been adding many new features in MDK and RL-ARM. For instance MDK-Professional now includes USB Host and NAND support.

We have also made a special offer as part of its introduction, all MDK-Professionals shipped before 30th September, 2011 include a ULINKpro at no extra cost.

There are other MDK Editions available (Standard, Basic and Lite) which are priced to allow developers to use the most suitable version for their requirements. MDK-Basic has actually reduced in price.

MDK-Professional includes extensive middleware libraries which are a fraction of the cost of similar products available from other commercial RTOS and middleware vendors.

Licensing
RL-ARM has always been licensed on a per seat basis. Every developer using MDK and RL-ARM should have a full license for both. This is clearly defined in the click-through End User License Agreement. Therefore, MDK-Professional does not make any change to the correct usage of the middleware components.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Mark Onions
ARM

Mark,

Thanks for your reply and clarifications.
After deliberation with our dealer it seems that we must make a choice: either upgrade to MDK pro until the end of march (and pay 3400 euro per seat), or be forced to pay the full 4190 euro after that date to upgrade.

Tamir

And you still want license fees per seat for the TCP/IP source too?

Tamir,

I may have misunderstood why you will need to pay an increased price in April. If you send me an email separately we can discuss offline.

Mark

Per,
as far as I know, you can't even purchase the TCP/IP source code any more.
I tried to purchase the sources, but were told that this package isn't available.

Marc,

Here is an excerpt of a email to marketing - hopefully it clarifies everything:

"It really comes down to this: the more licenses a company needs, the less interesting it is to remain using your networking and file system libraries. Why? It is quite simple, really: You charge the price of these libraries as part of the IDE, and one cannot even build an existing application on his computer unless he has a license (thus, downgrading to a non-pro MDK is not an option at all!). This is a sharp contrast to the way it is done by others which sell these components separately. For example, I can ask some software provider for a quote regarding a TCP/IP library. That provider might ask, say, 10000 euro. Once acquired everybody will be able to use it simply by linking with it. Your solution has its own merit, but cost effectiveness is not one of them, I’m afraid. Surely you can see that once the number of licenses grows (it is expected to grow here too, but we really need to think well before we do that given the costs and maintenance) it is becoming less and less interesting to use MDK-pro."

We were just in the process of asking about buying the TCP/IP source. Mainly as we have problems with their code and needed to alter it to be closer to our needs.

Out of the stack provided by Keil we have already had to replace their SMTP and TELNET applications due to some basic limitations, now we are having issues with HTTP which is not something I relish rewriting from scratch.

Not having the source is a very painful experience.