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!
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?
I've started a discussion in the ARM-Based Group at Linkedin:
www.linkedin.com/.../Has-Keil-lost-plot-on-85447.S.47395661