Microchip proposes prize for open sourcing "their" proprietary libraries | Hacker News Reader

Microchip proposes prize for open sourcing "their" proprietary libraries

adafruit.com

25 pointsangusgr7 comments

Or we could just use an AVR or Cortex-M3 with already-open tools.

The 1990s called; they want their crappy non-free embedded toolchain back.

The contest is a strange idea, unless the prize is truly massive, or the hardware target outperformed the competition. Why would anyone want to help a hardware company make their software tools better? I even kind of like Microchip's processors, but I have no more interest in helping them compete in the hobbyist market than they do in washing my car.

The Microchip guy asks: "Heck, who better to write these than the experts in the community…?" I'd suggest that a good candidate for someone better would be the people who designed the damn hardware.

In the end, I'm glad to see companies moving toward open toolchains, but once we have a couple that work, the onus is on the companies to keep up with their competitors if they want to survive.

I'm not that familiar with the M3, but some of the PIC chips have much more expansive hardware interfaces and internals than comparable AVR parts. A lot of times, PIC chips are cheaper, too.

Microchip can't develop the libraries internally due to contracts (it sounds like) so they're appealing to the community to bring them up to speed. They're offering compensation in the form of prizes. Why be negative on their attempt? They're trying to do the "right thing," granted, later than others, but still, it's a move in the direction the community wants them to go. Don't be negative about people trying to do the "right thing."

I think you're giving Microchip too much credit. They say that contractually they "can’t release [their] existing stacks", not that they can't port other open source stacks to their hardware, or develop their own from scratch.

I agree with you that they're trying to do the right thing, more or less. (Speaking for myself, not the OP,) the reason for the negative reaction is that they're touting their kit as "open source" when it's not, after a long history of proprietary development. If they had lived up to their claims from the start, I think the reaction would have been entirely positive.

Totally. Although the M3 has its share of weird proprietary stuff aimed at the hobbyist, like the closed source "cloud" compiler platform mbed.

I'm amazed that a company the size of microchip would actually respond in a non-flippant manner to something 'some guy' wrote on his blog.

http://dangerousprototypes.com/2011/08/30/editorial-our-frie...

Dangerous Prototypes are pretty well-known in the OSH/Maker scene, I wouldn't call them "some guy". More importantly, adafruit ran it on their blog which means it saw an even wider audience.

With ChipKIT, Microchip are undoubtedly trying to get a piece of the market that Arduino currently dominates.

They seem to understand that open tools/libraries is a factor there, but it seems they can't actually do too much about it.

They also seem to understand that community is a major factor in Arduino's success. I took that response to be a sign they are trying that, too.

Whether they'll succeed, I don't know. The market seems pretty flush with Arduino clones, copies and equivalents now. IMHO this article, "The End of the Open Hardware Cambrian Age", has some good theories about where things are headed: http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2010/12/end-of-open-source-h...

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