While welcome, this os a double edged sword. Once the bean counters realise it's no longer a direct revenue stream you can be almost certain of crappier support and flakier half baked untested releases, not that most embedded vendors have a stellar track record in this department anyway.
Companies make money off the Silicon, the tooling around it should be free, the more people use break/report bugs the faster the QA cycle resulting in better quality of the tools, they don't have enough patience to deal with in house QA maybe the resources/budget isn't there.
That's the way you and me look at it. Bean counters on the other hand are a different breed.
One thing to be aware of though is that although I might have a five or six figure silicon budget each year, there are now vast swathes of tinkerers whose spend is sub $100 pa, and for whom they're unlikely to see any return.
The biggest problem with skimping on QA on compilers in particular is that the way bugs manifest themselves are often subtle, and can cost a lot of money and time in your development projects. If you've ever suffered at the hands of compiler bugs, particularly unreported ones, you'll know what I mean. They're rare, but they do happen, and the workarounds are not always nice.
On the whole though I hope that other vendors follow suit, it's been going in that direction for some time. I just pray they don't skimp on the fundamentals and realise that delivering a crap compiler and tools will have a significant cost in sales because developers will give up and lose faith when it doesn't work.
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