I was recently reversing some old adware (which is not available anymore, so I had to fish it out of some open FTP) which has spyware attributes according to the following except from the EULA:


Typical spyware, but then at the very bottom of the license agreement, there is this interesting paragraph:


I wonder what the authors were thinking... but to me it feels like they're telling us to remove the adware/spyware features if we want to, and redistribute the "cracked" version "freely" (which I shall definitely do...!)

Nonetheless I had some fun killing the banner-displaying and "usage statistics" (actually turned out to be more than that... it essentially listens on port 80 and attempts to send random fragments of your internet traffic to a single plaintext URL) code. I guess it would be logical to disable those functions if the banner-server and "spying" server don't even exist anymore - as a result the program seems to randomly freeze up trying to connect to it

Software license agreements always contain at least one "loophole" like that which allows you to do whatever you want with it. It's more commonly hidden in some way, so you'll have to "reverse" the EULA too

Hmmm, I disagree about the "software license agreements always contain at least one loophole". This is not the case in most or all of the standardized licenses This one looks like it's a very bad attempt at creating by the programmers. The fact that it is literally contradicting itself is rather funny, but I must admit it's the first one I've seen so far that does so. Guess it just goes to prove, that if you want to create a license for your software, damn well better go with one that's been run-through by an attorney first

Fake