Recently, I’ve read a bunch of negative discussions around our acquisition of Winternals… the typical folks complaining about how Microsoft is going to hose them by suddenly and dramatically charging for the Winternal tools.
Which is frankly nuts, if you ask me. No company would start charging for tools that are publicly available for free… but conspiracy theorists will always lurk. These are probably the same people that think we’ve collecting detailed information about them during Windows Activation. (Which we are absolutely not. Note: I figure that I have to make sure I say this outright and clearly with the way our legal system works these days.)
In any case, let me state for the record that there are no plans to start "charging" for these current tools. We will be shipping a release of the Wininternals Admin Pack after we’ve done a complete code review on them. As for the SysInternal tools, we intend on moving them to Technet and our public Internet properties to keep the community around them alive. The sustained engineering group will decide what technologies will evolve into the OS or somewhere else in the future but their current instantiations will continue to be posted publicly.
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 