Matthew:
You did not offend me. What you did do was to amaze me that you are coming here say that you don't want to pay for software that you are using. Especially when you are not happy with what the vendor offers to the educational user.

Let me ask you a question.....When you went to college did you get that education for free? Were all the books free? Were the paper and pencils free?

I suspect that I can guess at the answers you give to the above. As such I can only tell you that if you want to use full versions of software with some or all of the attendant benefits (such as manuals and tech support) then that software should be paid for.

I know there is a "community" out there believes that tools and sofware should be free if you don't make money using it. But I'll tell you that there is no place on this forum for that kind of idea!! The vendors of 8051/8052 tools have adapted their educational support and evaluation tool sets to the modern day paradigm of offering time independent access to their programs simply by limiting the size of programs that can be built. This is an incredibly generous approach. In former times evaluation programs worked for a few weeks.

So there....That is my speech.

I would like to ask you think about one other thing though....Lets say you work in your educational manner on your real time operating system for the next 3 years. At the end of that time you have a pretty cool piece of software (at least you may see it as such). If the opportunity presented itself for you to sell that software to a potential user would you hesitate to take their $$$ for it? In another vein lets consider that my speech above has had some kind of impact and you happen to purchase the development suite from Keil (and it is one fine tool set too). You use this tool set and 3 years of your time to produce the most incredible RTOS that one could ever imagine. The product is really good and you manage to start selling it and make a few $$$. Are you inclined then to give a hoot if the development community takes free copies of your wiz bang product and uses it for free when you could have made a sale to them?

Michael Karas