Actually, the first mIRC versions were just for him, and he decided to release it to the public to see what other people thought of it. Seeing as, when they released the announcement mailing list, it quickly rose to 1,000,000 users, I'm guessing lots of people like it - strange how quickly people can turn, isn't it?
And also, you may note that the exploit wasn't discovered until very recently...Khaled and his team, to the best of my knowledge, were not the ones to discover it either. So, if the exploit was discovered when mIRC version 6.03 was out, he would have rapidly released an update for it, probably 6.04 - but it wasn't found until 6.11, so 6.12 was made.
Regards,
