In my view it is entirely fair game for them to charge for what they own but this is also an instance of why to avoid the .NET ecosystem altogether. The ethos

In my view it is entirely fair game for them to charge for what they own but this is also an instance of why to avoid the .NET ecosystem altogether. The ethos I follow and many developers whose opinion I care about follow as well is that platform technology and the most fundamental tools must not be closed source. The irony with Reflector is that while branded a debugging tool it is mainly good for reverse engineering, so Red Gate are now effectively charging for access to third parties' source code, which I personally find a bit troubling.