Would you like a competitive quote to a free product?

Continuing on our rant about tool prices, I got a call from IAR Systems this week.

The IAR person wanted to know what we thought of their compiler, as we have three seats for the AVR. I told the fellow that I was only using it in a single project now, and that I'd switched all but one of my projects to the Open Source WinAVR compiler, based on GCC.

They then asked me if I'd like a competitive quote to WinAVR. When I asked how you have a competitive quote to something that is free, my request was meet with silence. Kind of sums up my view of IAR.