Here is the original message I received tonight:

Hey, Nick Hodges, the Delphi Development Manager here.

I noticed that you are distributing some of our VCL code, which is a violation of our copyright and of our licensing agreement.

You have modified the code, but that still isn't allowed legally.

Can we figure out a way whereby you can still distribute your cool offerings but not distribute our code?  We really appreciate your support of the Dephli community, but I hope you understand that we have to protect our intellectual property.

Here is my reply:

I understand your concern. Honestly, I thought that forcing the Delphi 7 IDE to be running in the background to install the files should be enough.

It seems that this was not the case, according to your message.

I will make another release, with only the diffs, and a patcher from the official source files from 2002.

Does it make sense to you?

As I wrote in the newsgroup, "My only hope is that (...) some part of my humble work could be included in a future version of the compiler I use every day."

I hope you could be able to take a look at some of my rewrite (mostly in the system.pas unit).

In all cases, thanks for writing to me directly.

So I modified the installation package of our code. According to Borland/CodeGear/Embarcadero copyright, the original source files are now needed: this new installation package only contains the diffs made to the original Delphi 7 files.

You can download the self-installing package according to your current Delphi 7 version.

Update: a Delphi 2007 version is available.

Some details in this initial post.