Nebulosity is now open-source and free

There's hope this will change :-)

Give it some time. Obscurity and restrictive licenses are the main obstacles preventing ports to open systems, and the author removed both.

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For others not familiar with it, NINA stands for Nighttime Imaging 'N' Astronomy and is available from https://nighttime-imaging.eu

Yeah, like OpenOffice, or Blender, or Java, or UQM.

This is not a category of software that I'm familiar with, so I don't know how Nebulosity compares to its competitors, free or proprietary. My intuition says that 71,000 lines of C and C++ code is manageable for a person or group with the right motivation.

One thing that puts a clock on it in the intermediate to long term is camera support, which I gather from the README is a significant maintenance task. The project will bleed users if it doesn't support their new cameras.

Edit: it looks like Nebulosity sold for $95. Some other software in this space I see mentioned on the Cloudy Nights forum are Astro Pixel Processor (€ 165), PixInsight (€ 165), and Siril (free).

It does seem to me like the author doesn't expect to sell many more licenses and perhaps wants to wind down his work on it. This can definitely endanger a project (especially previously a one man show, bus factor and all). But instead of a fairly certain death, they have chosen to give the community a chance to keep working on it, which can succeed and help make Nebulosity the de-facto standard in its category.