@diamondman responded to this in another thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/338t25/the_lack...
"I actually want to hook OpenOCD into my Daemon to bring some sanity to how it manages devices. Several of my IRC friends prefer using closed source tools to open OCD calling open Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, frustrated the license is so strict (mine will be LGPL), and annoyed that everything has to be exhaustively specified in TCL files for it to do ANYTHING."
The TL;DR is OpenOCD's driver model itself is fixed/limited/standardized to a degree which prevented him from, in many cases, optimizing underlying controllers (or getting them to work at all -- e.g. OpenJTag, I believe). Also, see licensing disagreements above + unreasonable configuration requirements outlined in @diamondman's answer above.