>>You don't get to make up your own rules according to who you think is deserving; see points 1, 2, 3, 4
>
>Dear Jos,
>
>License and EULA are business tools, not 'law' or 'divine rules' like I understood was written earlier in this thread.

EULAs are contracts, Thierry. Contracts are covered under Equity Law, Admiralty Law, and several codifications of various levels of law in the U.S. You can go to prison for violating the terms of a contract (breach of contract). You can be fined extensively, both criminally and in civil courts. It's rare. It's unlikely. But the ability does exist, and it's usually this "force of possibility" that keeps people legal / honest.

It really is law because it is contract-based.

One other note: There is the issue of copyright. When an entity releases a work, it receives automatic copyright in the U.S. If you make a way to alter that work without their consent, it would be like getting a copy of Top Gun and editing out the part where Goose dies and re-distributing it as a "fixed up" version that makes people less sad. It's illegal to distribute altered works, and it is very likely illegal to provide mechanisms to allow others to alter them by the distribution of tools or knowledge that would allow them to alter their own product (it hasn't been tested in court on software to my knowledge, save the DeCSS case which was a little different because it circumvented purposeful encryption, and not standard data (a binary program is just data, not necessarily encrypted data, and even if it is encrypted, when it is in use and running it's been unencrypted) -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v._Reimerdes ).

I'm going to stop posting on this subject. I've said my piece. The law is clear (in the U.S.) ... each person gets to decide who they are to that man/woman they look at in the mirror, and the one they see themselves as when they look into the eyes of their children and grandchildren.