To me this is all a matter of ethics. When I enter into an agreement with someone I assume that the other party will live up to the stipulations of the contract. Once-in-a-while I'll cut the other party a break and not hold her/him to the letter of the contract if I can see that an honest effort at compliance has been made OR if I see that the other party's circumstances would make meeting the terms of the contract an unreasonable burden. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't appreciate it if the other party simply assumed that s/he could alter the terms of the agreement carte blanche without so much as a by-your-leave. So I try to be absolutely fastidious in making sure that I abide strictly by any terms of a contract into which I've entered. My attitude is that the time for negotiation is BEFORE the contract is entered. If I were to run into an unusual circumstance where I felt I would be harmed unduly by my efforts to abide by a contract, and if I also felt that getting an exception to the terms would not hurt the other party, then I'd ask that party to be released from absolute adherence to the problematic terms. But I'd still abide by the contract if the other party insisted. And I wouldn't hold a grudge about it.
After all, if I want to be able to hold others accountable to the letter of the law when it benefits me, I should be willing to abide by the same precept when it benefits others. If I feel that the price and terms of use of a given bit of software software is out of proportion to its utility, I use an alternative that offers me a utility / price ratio more to my liking. Since I used to work with software and operating systems which cost several thousands of dollars per workstation, and many thousands per server, the Win2K and WinXP OSes look just fine to me. On the other hand, by eliminating the EULA provision to use a single license for Office for my personal notebook and desktop systems, Microsoft has priced OfficeXP right out of the running for me. I like to annoy the managerial types anyway, so I use a freeware applications suite on my personal machines, and anyone who wants me to use my personal machines to work with files they produce has a choice of dealing with my file format requirements or buying me a copy of OfficeXP for each machine. (In my retirement I work exclusively for non-profits / research groups, so you can imagine how likely they are to buy me two copies of OfficeXP.)
Heck, for memos and letters and stuff I love to use a text editor -- with the Courier font. That really makes the neck veins stand out on some of the corporate types.