Of course, if HP or Dell encouraged the use of pirated software, that would be another matter. But I don't personally consider "ability to be used with WeatherLink" to be encouraging someone to do that. [Regardless of whether Davis makes unprotected WeatherLink software freely available]
As I said, Davis see it
very differently!
I did wonder if you might have worked for them
Curiously, I found and nothing about the workings of the datalogger whilst working for them and have only recently discovered, through this forum, the inner workings of Davis kit. So I honestly have little insider or proprierty knowledge of their equipment.
As a service technician I found it almost impossible to understand the guts of their kit because the "training" revolved around;
"this is how to fix a faulty ISS, first take your screwdriver, removed faulty ISS, replace with working ISS, dispose of faulty ISS....."
I come from a background of component level fault finding, so once you get a feel for the circuit boards the rest just comes naturally.