And blatantly infringe copyright laws (yes even Hiren has some rights under them).... ![:whistling:](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/happy22.gif)
He/she developed (or however assembled) the launcher and made some settings in it.
The program is (vaguely) defined as "Freeware", which does NOT mean:
the same laws that should prevent you from removing the string "Microsoft" from any of their things should prevent you from removing the homepage url or change it's title.
Yes - everyone has "rights", but I'm not sure that Hiren (as do many others) has stated what those rights are (or the ones he is giving up)...
In the case of Freeware, the only "payback" an Author has is to have his/her name written inside the app and possibly give some visibility to his/her site.
By changing that, you are actually depriving the Author of even this little and costless satisfaction. ![:ph34r:](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/scared9.gif)
More commentary on this below
@sbaeder
There is NO distinction about redistributability for Commercial vs. Personal use.
Something is either Redistributable or it is NOT.
There can be distinction about USE, but not about redistributability.
Yes - Once again, you have sharpened my statement to be more "correct"...
And BTW, a number of Freeware apps are Freeware
, but still are not redistributable
. (and the "right" way to change this is to write to the Authors and/or Copyright holders and try to tell them that Freeware should also be redistributable).
But even "freeware" isn't tightly defined. There are a LOT of licenses that could fall under this category - i.e. did I have to "pay" to use it?
The issue is that unless there is an explicit statement defining the rights that the author is granting, standard "copyright" terms could be applied. And it gets even more complicated because a lot of software is not sold, but is "licensed" instead.
I'll admit, that most times (and even here on this site w.r.t. scripts, etc.) we are all fairly loose on all this, and ASSUME that if it is posted without any explicit statement to contrary that it is OK to modify, use, redistribute, etc...So, it MIGHT be OK to go into the binary of that menu program, and modify it by patching the text strings for the website and the title string - especially if it is for your own personal use...Is it legal? Maybe. Is it ethical? Probably not. Without an explicit license (or statement) or even a copyright notice, it's hard to know for sure the true intent of the author.
But for now, let's just declare a truce for now...
![:white_flag:](http://reboot.pro/public/style_emoticons/default/character32.gif)
We all should try to do the "right" thing even if figuring out what that is makes our head hurt...