I would just have taken his source, compiled it and provided it for free -- he had no real intentions of opening it, and in fact never released his 'code' after

I would just have taken his source, compiled it and provided it for free -- he had no real intentions of opening it, and in fact never released his 'code' afterward, which proved my point. it's not the first time I see that, at my previous company, a guy took most of my in-house (closed source) middleware layers and was selling them as a 'product' as is on the interweb.