My company had nothing to do with it, but it's worth noting you're one of the few people who actually remembers the actual non-revisionist history.

Thanks for sharing the highly relevant piece of information. It always bothered me someone had to go through the effort to download the original source and rebuild the projects, just the thought of all the effort taken to do that... It seemed odd, I can imagine some projects having some obscure build processes (it happens) and the amount of effort taken to add in their spyware installer seemed a little crazy to me.

That is an interesting piece of info. I was under the impression that they had actually delivered modified installers. From a practical standpoint, though, this is an implementation detail and the effect was largely the same.