Lpc2000

Brett, 

> 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.

It's where the market is.

> If an ARM cross-compiler toolset is developed using one of 
> many basic windowing libraries and with portability in mind 
> then porting should _not_ be a major issue at all.

A toolset and IDE?  No, not a difficult thing to do at all.  All that
fluff that interacts with hardware on which debuggers much?  More
difficult, but doable.

> 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.

Some tools don't come with dongles and are dual-licensed, so you can run
them both on Windows or Linux or both--you choose.  For some tools, you
don't pay twice for a license on Linux and a license on Windows, and nor
are the prices inflated for Unix-style operating systems.

> 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.

Yeah, would love to offer a toolset on the Mac--we have even ported our
IDE to the Mac, but performance out of Qt is abysmal on Mac, so we just
can't release it.  That same toolset works nicely on SPARC Solaris too,
but zero interest outside silicon manufacturers.

Regards,

-- Paul.