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Comment by jepler | Hacker News Reader

I continue to be dismayed by how Microchip treats developers. Want a toolchain? You have to create an account. Of course, it's freeloading off of the Free software gcc toolchain. Even worse, when it comes to their microcontrollers that use the START or ASF4 system, you get headers that are incompatible with Free software (I haven't checked how they license the headers of the new tinyAVR series MCUs). At least when it was Atmel it was just a few pieces of IP that were guarded with stupidity like this (their touch interface is the only one I recall)

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I thought major benefit of AVRs was that you could ignore all that typical vendor bs and just use upstream avr-gcc and be happy. Similarly attiny being so simple mcu, you wouldn't need any libraries as just poking the registers is manageable enough for everything.

Yeah, noticed similar with ActiveState yesterday. Went to download ActiveState TCL just to do a 1-off compile of SQLite on a windows box... and now they require people to create an account to even download TCL.

Instead, I just deleted the SQLite requirement and avoided the whole thing. The only way to win is not play their game. :(

You could just use Cygwin or Msys Tcl. Or just build it yourself. It has always been an embedded language and the build process isn't problematic.

Wasn't worth the effort for this one off case.

It's actually ironic, as I had learning TCL on my todo list due to interest in CNC machining (some older stuff used TCL).

But not any more. Even going to the TCL language home page, they push people towards ActiveState. That's killed my interest in TCL entirely, and likely permanently.

Microchip need to realize that they're selling chips, not software. The barrier to entry should be as low as possible, providing a free, developer-friendly tool chain to attract hobbyists. Instead they treat software as another IP that should be milked. The unbearable developer experience actually drove me away from they PIC microcontrollers towards AVR many years ago. It's pretty obvious to me that the success of the AVR is in large part due to the open tool chain. Microchip makes very nice chips, I'd like to use them but they're handicapped by the obnoxious tools. It's unfortunate that they solved that problem by outright buying Atmel but not changing their own practices.

Just typical hardware manufacture stuff. They all do this sort of thing. I still remember trying to modify and build intel's yocto image a few years ago. It was completely impossible.

That's really annoying. I like to make little build environments with something like Vagrant and some scripts that will set up the toolchain. Having to use a browser and an account to download pieces to make it work makes that really difficult.

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