I read an article on Simple Talk by Bob Cramblitt that says that Red Gate software has reached an agreement with Lutz Roeder to be responsible for the future development of .NET Reflector. The same article goes on to say that Red Gate will continue to offer the tool for free.

I wonder exactly what that means, e.g. will it be a version behind that is free, or a somehow crippled version? I noticed that the article did not say the tool will continue to be free specifically, what it did say was:

The first thing we are doing is continuing to offer the software to the community for free downloading.

There are a number of programs that use verbiage like that to basically say that you can download it for free but not necessarily use it for free. And I wonder if the source code will stay available for free as well, with an Open Source license?

Should be interesting, but I am sure I speak for a majority of developers when I say that if it goes commercial it would be a real loss to the community.