I don't speak for Xavier Roche, but since this is a 
relatively "public" forum, i will respond to your comments.

I am a user of HTTrack, yet i also have a web page and do 
webmaster work. Further, one of my clients has a very large 
web site, yet they are also users of HTTrack. In fact, 
there are several posters on this forum who use HTTrack to 
collect info from other web sites and then disseminate it 
on their own sites. Some of these are huge archivers, such 
as one in Australia. Thus, they are both users of HTTrack 
and also webmasters themselves.

Consider where your argument is leading. Baseball bats are 
for playing baseball, but they have also been used many 
times to injure or even kill humans and animals. This can 
be done easily with a baseball bat. Are baseball bat makers 
to blame? If a baseball bat comes with a little card that 
says "Use only for hitting baseballs, do not use to harm 
another life." are they being hypocritical?
HTTrack is a powerful tool and it is all the more powerful 
because it comes with source code which can be modified. If 
it did not have the "override robots.txt" capability, 
someone could easily add it anyway by modifying the source 
and putting the changed version up for public download. 
Then there would be two versions going around. So, should 
the source code not be distributed? That is ultimately 
where your argument must lead. All because a relatively 
very small number of users choose to use the baseball 
bat "improperly".

What is the difference between using HTTrack limited to one 
single connection and someone using an interactive browser 
clicking though links? If i limit the connections to one 
single connection, then i feel it is VERY fair to use 
HTTrack to grab files from that site and IGNORE the 
robots.txt file. I am using it like an interactive browser, 
after all. You might ask why don't i just use an 
interactive browser? Well, perhaps i am disabled and moving 
the mouse around and clicking links is slow and painful. 
Perhaps i pay for my connection by the minute and would 
rather download a little faster and then read off-line.

I could go on with such examples, but i hope you understand 
my point. If you have read this far, i thank you for your 
tolerance.

Hypocrisy comes in many forms, we must all think of the 
consequences of what we do and what we say, what we stand 
for and what we are against. Perhaps it is a thin line, but 
in this case it seems to me Xavier Roche has made a very 
balanced choice, which is all we can hope to do in this 
life.

john