I've seen a drift in commercial software towards annual licence renewals. If you don't pay the renewal, the software stops working!
What I am generally exposed to is "no license, no support".

I have not seen the above (no license, no working) except from a screwy little local software house that called and claimed we used their "mandatory" screwy 'make' software illegally to maintain something they did for this company ages ago. I gladly informed them that their screwy 'make' had not been used for 5+ years because the first thing I did was to discard it and replace it with simple .bat files.

Yes, there are such idiots out there; however what I am generally exposed to is "no license, no support". With that I do not see a problem, if you dig up something ancient and want to maintain it with ancient tools, I consider it perfectly OK that if the "maintenance" is "major" you use the new tools with whatever "conversion hardships" that may encur. My experience is that if something can not handle a recompile with the new tools it was defective in the first place. Part of my testing is a compile with 2 very different versions.

I see again and again the argument for open source "if it fails you can fix it". How many commercial operations can afford to have an employee that is fully versed in the inner workings of SDCC?

Erik