>One of the things that really annoys me is that there isn't more openness and sharing in the embedded space. Embedded products are time and capital intensive,

>One of the things that really annoys me is that there isn't more openness and sharing in the embedded space. Embedded products are time and capital intensive, which means that the cost of a compiler or other tool-set is very small relative to the total cost of product development. Because of this, the developers (and their companies) do not mind paying a few thousand dollars for a new piece of software. Anything the developer creates is often only useful for competitors to one's product, so there is very little incentive to share. >I've gotten to the point where I can have their 'demo lesson' running in a fully open toolchain faster than they can get the rest of the attendees windows and custom package install issues sorted out. If you spend a year working on developing an entirely new hardware & firmware product, you see that importing new files, finding libraries, and adapting software from one IDE to another is not a very important or time consuming part of the project. When you spend a few weeks discovering that there are undocumented hardware glitches in the integrated circuit, that the errata is inaccurate, or that you own hardware behaves unexpectedly, the IDE is of little consequence. >I've been supporting efforts like the libopencm3 desire to build an open and common ARM support library, but more of that needs to happen to build in some good practices for these embedded developers to learn from. As an embedded developer, the open ARM library is of little interest to me. ARM is proprietary anyway, and building open-source projects on top of closed source systems does not seem to be a productive use of time.