What nonsense. It is not a violation of some sort of "terms of use" equivalent to use a power-drill to open a safe you stole. The drill is for whatever you want to use it for, illegal uses are covered by laws that are actually about those illegal acts themselves.

What I find amusing though is people who get bent out of shape by these sorts of clauses. Certainly "evil" people and criminals wouldn't care about these clauses, the only people that are bothered are people like the Debian project. The license is therefore effectively a license that only gives you permission to use the tool if you don't particularly take the license seriously. It is a license that forbids (rather than commercial use) blowhard use (probably commercial use as well, because of that). Brilliant that.

Reminds me of the excellent "Chicken Dance License".

> illegal uses are covered by laws that are actually about those illegal acts themselves.

My point exactly. Which is why I'm so confused why you think you're disagreeing with me. Maybe you need to reread my post?

Laws against using something in a certain way does not mean that the something is "not for" illegal things. What things are for and what they can be legally used for are normally quite orthogonal.

A "no illegal uses" licensing term is by no means an unstated default; it is in fact a rather unusual concept.

As fair as I can tell your interpretation of the phrasing is that it implies and only means to imply "Illegal things are illegal", which is a senseless tautology. In reality this phrasing says more than that.