The rights to L0phtCrack were purchased about a year ago by a company that made password cracking rigs for large companies to audit their employees passwords. They filed bankruptcy due to the GPU shortage changing their COGS overnight. When payments stopped being made the license reverted back to the author and he open sourced it.

This is the reason:

> at this point it is more a museum relic than anything practical

Were the records of payment a method to keep track of who might be using it?

Lol people paid for it? That was in the era of WinRAR and WinZip. There must be dozens of people that paid for those pieces of software