first, thanks for your enthusiasm
2nd i think the limitiations on hiring emploies are just things <not done yet> and as the game suffers some other more intensive problems our beloved coding-department
is working on those first. For reasons easy to be seen it wouldnt be a clever idea to give any exact release date, and even if so thats the project admins job, so just some humble remarks on this issue: as statet somewhere else in the forum the next (rather soon) step is RC5 which solves some major problems of rc4. still this won't be a finished ufo:ai, not at all. Once the engine / general game performance is done the content which is prepared for huge parts will be put inside so it will be more like an actual game rather than a engine.
As this game is GPL licenced it will be accessable to everyone who is interested, but this also means there is no big financial interest behind the development. Nevertheless everyone would be free to burn/copy/publish the game if he acts acording to this licence. Also some kind of cooperation with magazines will be an option to be discussed - once the game is done.
and its still some work to be done thill we get there...
ok, hope to have helped with at least some of the question and not having pissed anyone, best regards: Eric