Open sourcing it might be nice, but I'd just like to see it being maintained and updated by professionals.
Open or not, unless you have a strong project leader, you're going to get people going off in left field doing crazy additional stuff that drags down the project and breaks compatibility.
With cash on the line, I think there is honestly more incentive to stay on track and produce something of value.
If someone can make a little money there, good for them, I'm willing to pay for quality work.
Also, I may be inferring too much, but it sounded like Cloanto only had access what was released by Commodore. To me, that seems like binaries, documentation and probably the NDK.
I never heard anything about Cloanto and source code.