Software pattents don't mean anything outside the US, so all they need to do is release two versions: one for the US and another for the rest of the world.
that's true, althoe, in europe you have pandam to sw patents called "IP" that is pretty similar, and most of the algorithms are protected that way, but the main problem is "why bother"... there are *many* pic/avr/rabbit/... compilers around, and they are "fairly" cheep. mikroC is ~100E per section (up to 18* and dsPIC) so for 200E you get full pic support, that is not much imho ... for avr they have single solution for all of them that is ~70E (not sure they have C, I think only pascal) .. there is the boostC, ccs, hitech and many others ... so what would be the reason the invest serious time and money to develop the compiler, then to play administrative games with, you can dl this, and you can dl that, waiting for the company X to sue you for liability ...
I work in foss world, that's my b&b ... I push for linux app's where ever I can .. and to be honest, in the "elco" world, that just do not cut it ... as much as "elco" engineers share code, share schematics, ideas ... the developers of the "elco" tools are "crazy darn skico" .. I offered to one of the "usb oscilloscope developers" *FREE* help to port the driver and application to linux, after 4 months I got answer that they are not interested in making drivers for linux for their device ?!?!?! I asked nothing in return, I already purchased the device ...
So, when we look truth in the eye's, there's just too much hassle around it that is not related to development itself (administration, politics, birocracy) that I do not think we can expect foss pic C compiler soon
... look at the mikroE, all libraries are close source?!?!? why ?!?! do you see any reason for that ?! I do not ... but .. what can we do about it
.. check out the GCC, they also have only the optimizations they developed or that were "given" to them by some "nice" people ... they "could" do the same thing - one version for USA and another for the rest of the World, but - why bother ... those 10% perfomance is not worth it ...
anyhow .. I posted a pretty useless post now but feel much better afterwards