BGP Communities - almost an operational question

I've been trying to find out any logical reason why Ciscos limit me
to 16 communities per route. I'm not asking on cisco-nsp as I want
to know whether other routers suffer this limitation.

So:
a) Have I just read the RFC wrong?
b) Does other s/w (GateD. Bay etc.) have the same limitation?

GateD currently defaults to a maximum of 25 communities per route, but it
can be easily changed by increasing AS_COMM_MAX at compile time.