Recently while perusing the EULA for .NET Reflector I couldn’t get past the irony in the presence of the clause specifically prohibiting reverse engineering. Somehow it’s ok to reverse engineer somebody elses code but NOT ok to reverse engineer Reflectors code… hmm that seems a bit of a double-standard. While still grappling with how they could possibly justify this position, I begin to consider the newly touted ‘Pro’ feature of being able to step directly into third-party assemblies from within Visual Studio.
As any .NET developer knows, the use of Reflector is pervasive within most large organizations. So what I got wondering is, how will the legal departments of those organizations react when they find out that with a single key-stroke, a developer can inadvertantly be ‘reverse engineering’ a third-part library and thereby violating the EULA. It would seem to me that Reflector Pro will be contributing to, if not causing, the violation of EULA’s everywhere.
A Developer's 10 Cents 