Lpc2000

At 09:11 AM 3/23/2005, Brett Delmage wrote:
>I am getting tired of toolset vendors who offer useful products, but
>then cripple them and make developers lives needlessly unpleasant by
>only offering their products only on MS Windows.
>
>Messages like this one, on one toolset provider's web page bug me:
>"We are considering a Mac OSX / Linux port of our compiler tools,
>including ICCV7 for ARM. There is no firm commitment yet and nothing
>likely to be done until toward the end of 2005."
>
>Take note! You will not get my business then. Don't call me, I'll call you.

That's fine. Our philosophy is always that we can't satisfy everyone on the 
planet, we just need to satisfy enough of them to make a good business case.

Having said that, we are interested in doing OSX/Linux at some point in the 
future. Do you know that we use to sell our compilers under Linux, back in 
1998 or so? It's only command line on the Linux, but then again, 1998, most 
people did not (and may still not) care. However, our total Linux sales in 
about 2 years were less than 20 copies. It's always chicken and egg 
problem. The command line compilers take may be a day or two to port, but 
then there's the GUI issues. Nowadays we can use Qt, VxWindow etc., and 
that's probably what we will do. Those options are not available then.

>...
>
>Following the recent thread on dongles, It seems that some vendors are
>way more worried about copy-protection than building an excellent
>product that sells itself and that everyone will want to buy.

Speaking for ImageCraft, and I know a number of you would disagree, our 
reasons for copy protection is that we can then always put the latest 
update on the web and any customer can update without contacting us. With 
the V7, we even have the demo to become code size limited after 45 days and 
the users can use it for non commercial use, again without contacting us. 
We are not interested in getting your email so we can send you sales 
literatures etc., our products should stand for themselves. The demo is the 
real thing and the license keys unlock the features. This is really bad 
from a copy protection point of view. Copy protection SW companies advise 
people not to do this sort of thing. Why do we do it? Because we care more 
about getting the latest products out to as many people as possible. We 
trust that if someone were to use the product, then they will buy a legit 
license, rather than looking for ways to hack the demo or use the code size 
limited without paying. It is risky for us, and no doubt there are people 
out there using pirated copies. However, we feel that it's the right thing 
for us to do. It doesn't work for every business, but I think it works for 
us. For us, the dongle is the optional feature that allows a customer to 
install on as many machines as they want.

>...
>Too bad. There's some useful toolset product development going on, but
>it's wasted. I would like to see some serious competition on the Linux
>platform and have vendors to choose from.

I hope you're right :-) May be when we release the products, and if sales 
do not meet the expectations, I will send you a reminder message :-)

>   Brett
>

// richard (This email is for mailing lists. To reach me directly, please 
use richard at imagecraft.com)