Microchip buying Atmel

[jra]

It was announced earlier this week that Atmel rejected a bid by Dialog in favor of a bid from Microchip, see https://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/aboutus/acquisitions/atmel-acquisition.html for details.  Don't imagine there will be much short term effect but in the long run one has to wonder whether:

1) Microchip will be as friendly to the opensource community as Atmel was (thinking mostly of compiler support here)
2) How many 8-bit product lines Microchip will continue to support

[Felix]

Yup it's an interesting time. They would be stupid to stop making/selling atmel chips (perhaps in order to promote the PICs).
Just the atmega328p and 1284p chips that I am using are super popular, I see them in all kinds of commercial electronics and frankly a lot of stuff is 8bit and doesn't need more than that. It would greatly impact companies small and large that have an established development flow around these chips. And of course it would hurt the maker community and especially those folks that learn their way using these simple chips.

[Lensdigital]

But just to be on the safe side, gotta start learning how to use and program ARM chips