Okay, how about I clarify then.
First point: I didn't say that Aaron's income was so large that he could float on it. But it's greater than zero, and presumably greater than whatever he's paying out in order to host his games. In other words, he is not losing anything, and is gaining little drips of income now and then. This is passive income. It's not enough to live on, but there's no reason whatsoever, from a financial standpoint, to change.
Second point: I say again, Aaron gives ground very, very slowly, if at all. He was absolutely dead set against changing dragon strike scrolls in Paladin, and so some of them are just straight-up bad. He was very much against adding NVDA support, citing some vague nonsense about how audio games and screenreaders were not meant to work together, which I still don't get and which he only grudgingly gave ground on due to large public backlash in the original manamon thread. He has been very resistant to player feedback over the years. As such, open-sourcing the program is indeed saying "You guys go do what you want with it", but it's also a tacit admission that Aaron either didn't do his best work or is letting other people take over where he left off. For someone with a history of sticking to his guns, this cannot be easy.
Now combine point 1 with point 2. So he doesn't want to come off as the guy who gave the community what it wanted after so firmly rejecting its help. And he doesn't want to lose that sporadic revenue source, however small and inconsistent it might be. So the games are not open-sourced, and are extremely unlikely to be in the future.
If it were me, I'd probably just get to a point where I decided the community should just get whatever is left, and I'd open-source my stuff and tell you guys to go to town. But then, I'm not nearly so dead set in my ways, either, and I'm not above admitting when I'm wrong. For me, if not for Aaron, coming back a year later and seeing my old project revived and made loads better would please me. I might be a little annoyed that I didn't think of these improvements myself and capitalize on them, but in the same breath, I'd realize that I had no one but myself to blame on that front.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1