The product page indicates that this is avail for education only.  OK. But what is the license?  Do I have to buy one per seat / one per classroom / ???

If it is one per seat (at $300 per seat) than is there another alternative?

John,
  You could contact Bytecraft directly for licensing information.  This is the link to their support contact page.

Check out this page
http://www.sxlist.com/techref/scenix/languages.htm
for other options (Hitech C, JAL etc)
And there is of course SX/B.

John,
The educational version is actually the same as the full version - only the price differs. If you really wanted a site license (I doubt you do) then I'd go to ByteCraft and make a better arrangement. No, ByteCraft does not sell many of these.

I suggest SX/B - not only is it free it's fully integrated into the SX-Key IDE. Our future plans with SX/B are to continue increasing the number of examples and applications. There are no plans for SX/C.

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

john
i learned 6 different programming languages in college and i dont use any of them in the field today.developing algorithms is the most important lesson.

in the other hand 'C' looks better on a syllabus.

(Funny)
I think I am up to over 20 languages (C, ADA, Fortran, Pascal, Cobol, .... you know the drill) that I have learned in my career.  There are many similarities causing one to ask ... "why can't they settle on a single standard?".  But, in the end you realize that some languages are better suited than others.  You are quite right in that a solid foundation in program development and concepts is probably the most important lesson of all.  Because of my experience in programming I can pick up a new language pretty quickly (although, this last summer I took a class on 8051 and timers just dragged me all around the field).

It will be a long time before there is a "universal language": PBASIC is well suited for the MCU environment but could not hack it as a business programming language (i.e. databases, printing reports, downloading and analyzing data from the Internet).  On the other hand Visual Basic . NET would not fit on an inexpensive MCU.  Although they are similar in name, they are worlds apart in syntax and what you can do with them.

The Ubicom seems to have the right mix of features (i.e. virtural peripherals, Assembler, BASIC, low cost, great tech support and documentation) that make it a fun project all around.  The new SX48 and SX52 development boards are a tremendous bargain! (I just got mine in the mail!!!)   I'm afraid I'm going to wake up and find that Parallax is no longer offering those for $10 but the new price is $70  ....  (Thank you Parallax for the great product / price)
I think my hesitation at building a curriculum around the BS2 was the per unit cost and my perception at its limited capabilities (I can't say I have ever filled up a BS2 to the limit).  Thus, my introduction to the Ubicom SX line was "WOW" and I'm looking forward to building an Embedded Programming curriculum around it.  
I just wanted the "C" compiler so that I could try to convince one of my colleagues to teach a course on it (C is his language of choice).  Above, Peter posted a link to many alternatives and I'll be sifting through those in the coming weeks.  (Thank you Peter)
Meanwhile Nick, keep preaching the "developing algorithms" sermon because I agree with you!  I have several friends that consider themselves "programmers" but have a hard time organizing, documenting and in some cases understanding concepts like arrays, objects and interrupts.

[Quoting: "john couture"](Funny)
Meanwhile Nick, keep preaching the "developing algorithms" sermon because I agree with you!  I have several friends that consider themselves "programmers" but have a hard time organizing, documenting and in some cases understanding concepts like arrays, objects and interrupts.

I have used Pavel's C compiler for a number of years;
http://www.picant.com
This compiler can do the SX and PICs, and has fair pricing.  It has a few bugs that I work around, and it might not exactly be "commercial grade", but I like it.

The biggest problem will be figuring out which product to use.  "C2Cplus" is the old C compiler, 'C2C++" is a C++ compiler*, and "BoostC" is the latest one, but I think it only does PICs.  With their work on BoostC some of the C++ compiler bugs don't get fixed quickly.

*It is hard to imagine writing C++ programs for the SX, but I have used it successfully for small projects.  One benefit in the educational setting is being able to see the machine code generated.  This removes a lot of the mystery of how C++ works...

I recommend looking at the free download of C2C++ and see how you like it...

John,
If you're hooked on using SX/C in the classroom and find the fees excessive (as I do) then I [me, Ken] will call ByteCraft and get a better arrangement for you. I imagine we could get the single $295 educational site license to span a number of PCs without a challenge. We recently did this for the engineering program at CSUS (Sacramento).

Are our customers telling us we need to find a better [free, cheap, low-cost, fully-integrated into the SX-Key] solution for C? Something near commercial grade?

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

Please consider funding the development of an SX port of SDCC. The existing PIC port is a good starting place. The previous author of that code (the PIC port) has stated that it could be brought up to commercial grade code production in 6 months time by a good programmer. But it could probably be producing "ok" code in much less time if the SX type chips were focused on exclusivly.

[Quoting: "Ken Gracey (Parallax)"]
John,
Are our customers telling us we need to find a better [free, cheap, low-cost, fully-integrated into the SX-Key] solution for C? Something near commercial grade?

Ken Gracey
Parallax, Inc.

I'm even OK with paying a little for an upgrade. I'd be willing to fork $100 out of my pocket for such a compler that was Part of th SX-IDE. I'd probably fork out even more from my buisnesses.

I'm OK with asm. I can make a lot of hardware talk to a lot of other hardware, but I fumble a bit with multi byte math stuff. It would be really nice to have some way to easily deal with floats, or at a minimum 32bit ints. Standard multiply, divide, add, subtract would go a long way.