Sadly, paid compilers still exist, and paid compilers requiring a licensing dongle still exist. The embedded development world is filled with staggering amounts of user hostility.
My understanding is that much of the established embedded world has moved to any one flavour of GCC or (more commonly) Clang, just because maintaining a proprietary optimising compiler is too much effort than just modifying (and eventually contributing to) Clang.
Tough for me to speak about embedded in general, but many companies are on vendor toolchains or paid compilers by choice, and it is the right choice to make given the tradeoffs involved.
IAR for example is simply a fantastic compiler. It produces more compact binaries that use less memory than GCC, with lots and lots of hardware support and noticeably better debugging. Many companies have systems-engineering deadlines which are much less amenable to beta quality software, fewer software engineering resources to deal with GCC or build-chain quirks (often, overworked EEs writing firmware), and also a strong desire due to BOM cost to use cheaper/less dense parts. And if there is a compiler bug or quirk, there is someone on the other end of the line who will actually pick up the phone when you call.
That said, some of those toolchain+IDE combos absolutely do suck in the embedded world, mostly the vendor-provided ones (makes sense, silicon manufacturers usually aren't very good at or care much about software, as it turns out).
> Tough for me to speak about embedded in general, but many companies are on vendor toolchains or paid compilers by choice, and it is the right choice to make given the tradeoffs involved.
That's true in general. With paid licenses and especially subscriptions, you're not just getting the service, you're also entering a relationship with the provider.
For companies, that often matters more than the service itself - especially when support is part of this relationship. That's one of many reasons companies like subscriptions.
For individuals, that sucks. They don't need or want another relationship with some random party, that they now need to keep track of. The relationship has so much power imbalance that it doesn't benefit the individual at all - in fact, for most businesses, such customer is nothing more than a row in an analytics database - or less, if GDPR applies.
8051s pretty much mean Keil - they used to do license dongles, but it's all online now. You really don't get much more established than the 8051. If you pick up any cheap electronic product and crack it open to find a low part count PCB with a black epoxy blob on it, chances are very good there's an 8051 core with a mask ROM under the blob.
(Also AVR/PIC compiler from Microchip had a dongle as recently as February this year, and it looks like it's still available for sale even though its license isn't in the new licensing model).
