I just don't understand why hardware design teams aren't willing to learn entirely new CAD systems just to satisfy the political correctness whims of the end users... :-;
I'd much rather have Eagle files without gerbers than gerber files with design files in a fully proprietary non-free package (ST seems to provide gerbers and Altium CAD files. Bleh.) After all, even the free version of EAGLE can view, print, create gebers from, etc designs that exceed the limits of the free-version editor. (only editing is prohibited, essentially.)
the biggest limitation: "Use is limited to non-profit applications or evaluation purposes."
It's a whopping $69 to remove that limitation (while retaining the size/layer/etc limits.) (Used to be $49. Sigh.)
Of course, the kicker is that the last several times I tried to use KiCAD, I couldn't get it to work. (Yeah, that was a while ago, and I should probably try again.)