Hi, I guess there are a few things to put clear:
> it is wired up slightly differently from the gnICE, and the creator of the > ICEBear has no interest in supporting open source tools -- he has his own > closed source forks of things (perfectly legal as they're BSD and such) that > are "faster" and only work with the ICEBear, so he wants people to pay the > extra $$$ for it. It's not that I have no interest in going open source (I'm the ICEbear creator). There were just a few reasons in the past to no longer bother: 1. the bfemu library (that is running on the ICEbear and other FX2 based adapters) has been hosted opensource at blackfin.uclinux.org initially. However, it was turned into a mess, so I had no longer interest in maintaining it there. 2. I have become aware that some people had been misusing the license, i.e. doing closed source portions of it. I have no interest in giving know-how away and not getting anything back. 3. I have to find a way of covering the development costs, as I'm no big company like ADI which can afford to outsource tasks to asian countries to save on costs. 4. Nobody has ever seriously contacted me about opensourcing the stuff and supporting the development. It seems that, once you give one thing away for free, the next is expected for free, too. I'm not so much up for that. The feedback I get from customers prove, that I've gone the right way in providing a professional tool, including in depth-customer support (that's what makes the ICEbear a bit more expensive than the gnICE). I have no problem with a cheaper clone that is adressing the people who have enough time to build their tools from opensource. It's simply a different market. I don't want to address the masses, and I can not cross-subsidy my development. ADI can. (Mind you, they still sell their VDSP ICEs above USD 1000). Since my client base is normally spending 10'000s on factory programming hardware, they are obviously happy to spend a few 100$ on a tool that does the job on their units in the field or on the production lanes. So the message is just simple: You get what you pay for. Greetings, - Martin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ UrJTAG-development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/urjtag-development
