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Metrowerks Putting Linux on Hold
yamla writes "Metrowerks, developer of the CodeWarrior development tools, has decided to put their professional Linux tools on hold. Since being bought out by Motorola, they've changed product emphasis and although their Linux guy in R&D wants to go ahead, management has put the product on indefinite hold. I want to develop using CodeWarrior 5 for Linux but apparently, this program may now never see the light of day. " I've talked with some folks over at Metrowerks and have confirmed this - from what they've said, the earliest it would be out is next Fall. Click below to read their account - and remember that it's better to sign the various petitions around than it is to flame people.
We currently have our plans for the Professional Linux on hold. Our head Linux guy in R&D wants to develop the product, but management has the project on hold. We have had some product changes since Motorola bought us out. You can keep checking the website for any news on the product, but the earliest it could possibly be release would be next Fall.
Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.
Metrowerks
Okay, I'll let you argue your point. How about this... GCC is targeted at over a 30 microprocessors.
Can run under
Not that I don't mean to say that your prefered environment isn't FANTASTIC.. but it is certainly not the best cross platform(if judged by this merit alone) tool available. I too would like to see a better interface developed for GNU.. but it's not there yet.
Also, don't you even TRY and argue that you are more a more professional developer because you bought your tools. The software and web-sites I have single-handedly designed and wrote over the past 5 years has brought on over 150 Million dollars of revenue a year. And yeah.. I still prefer perl, gnu c, and make.
And you comment about managing "large complicated projects" doesn't even push wind. Please.. someone do a wc -l on
I would argue that our "antiquated" tools are MUCH better designed for large, complicated, and geographically devided development teams. It just doesn't hold water to compare them. Good tools fit the developer, not the other way around. Good tools can use command line AND gui environments well. I havn't use Metrolink in 3 years.. but it wasn't there yet.
Besides, it makes you look like a ranting asshole. If you have a preference for the Metrolink development environment - then that's A-OK. Enjoy it. But why the need to take cheap pot-shots at the rest of us?
Pan
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
The petition link is broken, or at least the evil proxy I'm sitting behind doesn't like it.
Fixed link here.
Anthony
"I think any time you expose vulnerabilities it's a good thing." -Attorney General Janet Reno
Metrowerks makes by far the most popular development environment for the Mac. Symantec used to, but during Apple's transition from 68K to PPC chips, Metrowerks got there first with PPC support, and Symantec was late. Symantec's product is no longer even available. Metrowerks probably realizes that with Mac OS X on the way, someone could do to them what they did to Symantec if they're not careful.
It will require significant resources to bring CodeWarrior to Mac OS X, so it's possible that Linux development had to be scaled back. Of course the fact that Mac OS X runs on PPC, while Linux is mostly used on x86 machines probably plays some part in this as well.
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I don't see the point of complaining. A cavaliar [sic] attitude towards customers is an inherent feature of closed source software.
This is nonsense, of course. Any business that adopts a cavalier attitude towards its customers is dead, but doesn't know it. Unless a monopoly barrier to entry exists, the company will be devastated by its competition in due course.
The decision to focus limited resources in favor of an existing customer base over a potential new or expanded customer base is rational, and reflects due attention to, not neglect of, one's customers.
As Bork wrote, the truth is far more interesting. Market-based proprietary systems tend to be far more responsive to broad-based customer demands than does individual open-source work, precisely because there is no individual who is accountable to the marketplace. A company can justify expending significant resources because the spending of a dollar generates greater return.
For PRECISELY THIS REASON, however, open source can far more effectively serve minority, or orphaned market needs. Here, the minority customers do end up being unserved, because no one can justify building the larger infrastructure to build an entire application with the minority-needed feature, but the entity with the big shell is busy handling majority-market requirements. With open source, the infrastructure is there, and if it is effectively reusable, minority interests can be economically served if truly needed.
So, there is truth to both positions. However, to accuse Metrowerks of ignoring present non-customer and minority customer interests precisely when they are attending to majority customer interests with their limited resources is sophistry at best.
Our cross-platform product build process is completely based on Metrowerks' tools. We were promised on several occasions by the president and CTO of Metrowerks that the Linux tools were in the pipeline for release "soon". Metrowerks had already done most of the hard work when they ported their tools for use on Solaris. Supporting Linux just isn't that hard after that. I could give a rat's ass about signing "support Linux" petitions. It's not like corporate software execs are going to pay attention to a list of people who have a credo that says they think all software should be free. That's no motivation for them to expend R&D dollars on a product for a market that doesn't pay for software in general. What I *do* want is someone at Metrowerks to step up and honor the promises they made to hundreds of professional developers that were counting on CodeWarrior tools to deliver cross-platform versions of their product to Linux users. There are plenty of products that will now never see the light of day on Linux because the cost will be too high to retrofit them into the text-only Makefile nightmare that is g++. THAT should be a reason for Linux users to complain -- Metrowerks' decision to cancel this product deprives you of software that otherwise will never be ported from Windows or the Mac because Linux doesn't have the rich set of IDE-based tools that modern developers rely on to deliver code in a cost-effective manner. Please don't consider the previous statement flame bait. It's not. It's a cold, hard fact about managing large, complicated development tasks. There are better ways to do it now in the 21st century than using a directory full of text files glued together with a batch-oriented makefile. Metrowerks has what is arguably one of the best cross-platform environments for doing this and now you'll never see it (or the software that would have been ported with it) because Metrowerks has reneged on a long-standing promise. Boo!
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
Jeez. Chill.
Metroworks is a tools company that was just bought by Motorola, a major international corporation that has a completely different way of working.
Anytime there is a buyout like this, the smaller company will go through a months long period of adjustment and resource re-allocation to be (for lack of a better word) assimilated. Becuase of these changes in company focus, there will be a number of products that are put on hold, especially smaller projects such as linux codewarrior.
Codewarrior will not killed off. It's one of the leading development environments for Mac's. Therefore Motorola has a vested interest in keeping it going becuase they make Apple's chips.
Once the realignment is complete, Metroworks will probably pick up the projects that were put on hold. If they had not recognized the value of linux tools, they would not have started the project in the first place.
Note that Motorola Computer Group was one of the first people to sign on for embedded linux. I would not be surprised if MCG has already started apply intra-corporate pressure to have the linux codewarrior project continued.
"You want to kiss the sky? Better learn how to kneel." - U2
Sig:
Barbeque is a noun. Not a verb.
I know a lot of you think that gmake is sexy and that real programmers debug using printf, but once you've used a real IDE like CodeWarrior, everything else seems so primitive. It would be a shame to see the Linux version dropped.
I routinely use MS DevStudio on Windows and CodeWarrior on the Mac, and there is just no comparison. DevStudio is quirky and frustrating, and their debugger is both unintuitive and limited. CodeWarrior is slick, clean, and fast, and the debugger is a joy to use. It's the little things, like dragging and dropping files into the project and having it do the right thing, or being able to click on a void * in the debugger and being able to instantly view it as an array of 100 doubles (or whatever else), that make it so much nicer. I've never found an environment with all of these features in the Unix world. Let's hope they change their minds and continue the CodeWarrior/Linux project.
Linux has made it this far without anything as extravagent as Codewarrior.
People typeset amazingly beautiful documents before LaTeX came around, and people got from point A to point B before automobiles. This is no argument that we shouldn't embrace new technology.
There's still large factions that say that the CLI is superior to the GUI.
If you're doing kernel hacking or scientific programming, sure, why even boot into X when virtual terminals are so fast? For the rest of us, we need to develop applications that have user interfaces, and visual tools speed up this process immensely.
There are hundreds of free alternative to Code Warrior.
There are hundreds of web browsers, too, but most of them suck. CodeWarrior is robust, fast, and mature, and it has a large user base already.
It seems understandable for a company to doubt how much impact their product will have on a hugely saturated market.
Here I agree with you. Most current Linux users will not switch. However, I think that having CodeWarrior available for Linux would help entice developers coming from the Windows/Mac world.