Why HCS08 not popular with hobbyists.

[legacy]

Motorola/Freescale/NXP/PDQ/etc. in particular was difficult this way. For industrial embedded projects, dealing with a network license is very troublesome due to the difficulty of even getting a network connection in some equipment location. FlexLM in particular is detestable.

well, have you ever used anything by Windriver? THEY are even more detestable, ... compared to them, everything else (especially the old FlexLM stuff) is .. a piece of cake 

[Siwastaja]

Professional tools from manufactures which are be partly funded by the cost of the tools and generally have much better support than a bunch of hobbits on a forum. Not all open source/free tools are bad but may really are quite fractionanalized and with very arrogant forum support (if any).

It's interesting how this idea lives and lives. I do see it makes sense and the idea is internally coherent, so it's a valid expectation, but I'm seeing very little evidence that this is actually the case.

Quite the opposite has happened: "professional tools" have often become simple wrappers to run the open source tools. Many GNU tools, for example, have development history and tradition of three decades in them, and are used by almost anyone, hobbyist or professional. The proprietary part does less and less, and for a good reason: they have noticed it's better that way.

Whenever the "professional" tool is really a proprietary piece of software, it's quite common that it's an almost unusable piece of shit; but yes, if you pay enough, you'll get someone to answer the phone for you and help you out with an issue caused by their broken software.

This is the reality about most software development tools. In CAD, it's a different world altogether, where proprietary design software rocks and will probably do so for a long time.