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You'd need to reverse-engineer the built java files, which probably isn't so easy and that a company will do this

Not for a company, just for my own testing, but I did this several years back.

It was ridiculously easy assuming you know how a java decompiler works. One JAR needed to be patched and re-compiled, which is a trivial process if you know how classpaths work.

You don't even need to patch any files - you can patch classes at runtime using a "-javaagent" library.

There are plenty of libraries out there to facilitate this such as Javassist or Apache BCEL, and lots of legitimate uses (AOP, instrumentation, etc).

It'd be weird to have access to the command line but not to the jars themselves, I think. Creating a jar is simple if you have a zip program.

Can’t you just firewall it? I imagine you’d lose support though.

Depends on what kind of check it's doing. I doubt it fails open and if it does you're violating the license and open to big damages from Atlassian.

I imagine reverse engineering it to not phone home would violate the license in the same way.

Yeah I meant even if it does fail open such that you could hack it to keep using it, doing so would definitely violate the license.

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