Classic embedded development tools

The FPGA/Xilinx swearing around here reminds me... Many years ago (OK, decades, actually a good chunk of a century now) the tools for doing embedded software development from the manufacturers were: 1. Distributed as source code 2. Widely portable 3. Well-documented in terms of file formats Examples are the Intel 8008 PL/M compiler they released in Fortran and the original PALASM (Monolithic Memories?) in Fortran. (IIRC the PALASM source appeared in printed form in one of the manuals). Even for commercial tools, the three "good things" enumerated above were often true. The reason for this openness was because user's didn't all have identical development platforms, often they had access to a timesharing system or a departmental minicomputer that they used for cross-compilation etc. Since then of course the tools have become MSDOS/Windows-only, distributed only as binaries, and sometimes the file formats/ programming process are trade secrets (often reverse-engineered by those using them!) I can see why this happened: supposedly everybody had a PC-clone running Microsoft software, so you could just give away or sell binaries instead of source code. Of course, freeware embedded tools (e.g. GNU and others) today reflect a backlash against the Windows-ization of embedded development tools. A similar thing has happened to SPICE (most users are not using the open-source Berkeley code but instead proprietary versions which lock them in to a specific vendor and that vendor's component models). And there's the backlash to this in the open-source community (SPICE3 with ngspice/gEDA and some GUI's layered on top of it.) But in my experience, outside the hobbyist community the freeware embedded tools don't have much traction. I'd be glad to be proven wrong! Actually I do know of a couple of small commercial projects that used gcc for StrongARM and have heard of a couple that use gcc for MSP430. I myself use gputils (GNU PIC utilities) and gpsim occasionally and am occasionally forced to plunge into hell with commercial embedded development tools (which mostly suck) under Windows. OK, that's my pontification for this morning. Tim.