Yet, there's nothing in the license keeping you from downloading it, removing the license code yourself, and running it registration-free. (Your personal sense of morality may differ, I suppose.)
For curiosity's sake, what would be the legality of a patch to remove said licensing code from the code?
I was considering doing this same type thing with one of my mac applications. My thought was, if they download it, remove the registration, and get it going without a license, at least they have the source on their computer and familiarity with it. The possible will make a good contributor. I was also thinking about creating a "developer license".
Normally I'd interpret it like you have, but the license specifically says that only redistributions must keep the licensing in tact. I don't know if that was an intentional thing on their part or just a mis-wording that they didn't mean, but it definitely says that you have to keep the licensing in tact if you redistribute it.
I'm guessing that it was intentional. There are some people willing to go through the effort to remove the licensing from the source and compile. Who cares! The real issue (in terms of losing profits) is if one person is able to remove the licensing and redistribute that change.
A patch to remove a registration check is arguably a tool for copyright infringement no matter what the license says (the author is still the copyright holder after all). But I'm certainly not a lawyer.
Probably (Not a lawyer, etc) legal. There's versions of XChat for Windows that are built from the source and have no differences besides the licensing code stripped out of it.
XChat is different. XChat is free software (GPL), and the "official" windows code is a completely separate add-on with code that has never been released. The freely-available windows builds use different code, and as a result there is no licensing controversy whatsoever. It's a GPL'd derived work of a GPL'd project.
In fact, the author of XChat is likely violating the GPL by distributing the Windows version without full source code. Since he's accepted third-party patches under the GPL, he has to distribute all derived works under the GPL (or remove all the code that isn't his). This means that currently his closed-source Windows version is a GPL violation.
I know that if I had code in XChat, I would be upset by this.
So you have all the source, but if you build something based on it, only licensed owners of E can use it?
edit: I take it back, you do not appear to get the source to ecore.lib, which appears to contain licensing code and perhaps other things.