suggest let codewarrior be free

[bluehacker]

The suggestion seems to be crazy. but I believe it's a correct suggestion. I am chinese engineer and work at university. Freescale's MCu/MPU is very Competitive in technology. But freescale is not good at market. In china, except for some big company, almost nobody use freescale's MCU/MPU. why? why atmel's avr become popular so quickly in china? you know atmel'avr just came into being in 1990s, while freescale's hc05/08/hcs08.. and coldfire and powerpc have more long history. why?According to my point of view, I think some reasons is critical.

1. there are not free or very low cost development tools,including IDE, compiler and emulator(BDM..). you may debate the codewarrior and usb-tap etc bdm tools is low cost. but for chinese, they are too expensive!  I know one usbmultilink cost 5000RMB, I can't afford it，and most company and person can't afford the price.

why avr become so popular in china? one reason is there are some free development tools, for example , the open source winavr project give us a free and powerful IDE. avrJtag emulator cost only 100-400RMB(15-60 dollars). except winavr, the ICCavr IDE/compiler is also free, because some hacker crack it , many engineers use iccavr for free. you may say crack iccavr and use cracked iccavr is illegal. yes ,it's illegal, but it occupy market, atmel company sold much and much avr mcu.

In china, almost everyone use microsoft windows OS illegal. but microsoft  indulge。 I believe if Microsoft Prohibit illegal Windows user， Microsoft will never become a software empire. linux will kill windows in china.

2. there are not Convenient way to buy freescale's chips. In china buy freescale's chips is very difficult. Freescale's Distributors in china  have not good service attitude. and the price of chips is more higher than freescale's. 

So I suggest freescale open codwarrior for free. because codwarrior is not freescale's main product.  freescale's most important products is chips , freescale is not a software company ,it's semiconductor company. if freescale provide free development tools(IDE and BDM emulator), it will provoke companies and persons learn and use freescale's MCU/MPU. there are so many users, the chips Shipments will increase.

another suggestion is improve the distributors, make them better. 

[daniel8]

I agree with most of the comments, other silicon vendors (at least mcu and mpu ) have their IDEs for free ...
Checking the price model, I would have to pay more than a thousand dollars just to check the viability of a prototype, hence , despite how much I like the architecture of a processor for an specific approach, I can't expense that much on a project on its initial phase

[vier_kuifjes]

Maybe it's a nice idea to make the code size limit target dependant. Why not remove the limit when using only the internal memory of the device?

My personal hobby project runs on a MCF52233, using Coldfire Lite. The object code size of this application is about 120kBytes in size. 27kBytes of that is my own personal code. I use the basic floating point library (add/sub/mul/div) which also adds about 33kBytes to the project.

So I constantly have to be careful not to hit the artificial limit of the linker while knowing that plenty more room is available...

It gets even worse when using Kirin3 (MCF52259). 512kBytes of flash memory is available of which only 128kBytes can be used. Hardly enough room to put MQX on it, some demo apps are simply too large to fit in the 128kBytes limit...

[J2MEJediMaster]

1) Are you aware that there are a special editions of CodeWarrior that cost you nothing? They are a fully-functional set of the tools, although there are some restrictions as to the amount of code they can generate (for example, 32 KB of code for certain tools). The special edition tools can be downloaded from this page.

2) I will pass this information onto our sales people.

---Tom

[bluehacker]

yes, I know the special edtion, and using it now. codewarrior for s08 is 32kb code size limited, it is enough for many projects. cw for coldfire is 128kb code size limited, it also is enough for many projects. but if I want to run rtos and tcp/ip stack, it will be not enough.

cw can't give freescale much money, it's just tools. while chips is the more and more important for freescale.

by the way, BDM tools is too expensive, I know many small company and students don't use freescale's MCU, just because they can't afford the cw and bdm, or they don't be willing to afford, since there are many alternatives:8051, avr or arm， which are all cheaper than freescale's. I have been one engineer for 8years, and use 8051, avr, pic and arm7/arm9 to develop some products, except for PIC, I never cost more than 100 $ for development tools(IDE,compiler, JTAF/BDM tools). the only exception is PIC ICD2 tools, for the sake of developing one product using PIC, I cost 100+ dollars to buy PIC ICD2. I never buy IDE/compiler,  IDEs/compilers which I used are all free.

you may say I am the special exception, I say NO, most companies and persons never cost money buy IDE/compiler.

I like freescale, and hope it can be the most leading company in the world for ever. 

[randyrho]

I've worked for numerous companies as an R&D engineer. Distributors and the various semiconductor companies usually comp me the development tools in order to sell their silicon. If I can't get the tools free, I don't consider using the processor, unless there is a feature that I can't get anywhere else. Any time I wish to evaluate a new processor, I have to justify the tool cost to management. This attitude is prevalent throughout the industry. Another difficulty is when I teach at university. I end up having to teach a limited set of processors that provide free tools. The ones with size-limited options work much better than the time-limited. When the students graduate, they tend toward designing with the microcontrollers they used in class. Ask any distributor. Once a design team decides on a given processor, they tend to stick with it for numerous follow-on developments. Some of this is due to learning curve and written software base, but much is due to availability of development tools. I guess the various semiconductor manufacturers can't decide if they are in the chip sales business or the dev tool business.