Personally, I find this part the most confusing/disturbing:

IV. All useful modifications to this software must be licensed back to the original licensor such that the original licensor can relicense the modifications to third parties under terms of their own choosing with no restrictions whatsoever and no need to even acknowledge the origin of such modifications. There are two easy ways to accomplish this: put all such modifications into the public domain or assign the copyright to the original licensor.

This is basically saying, if you do anything useful with his stuff, he wants it back, and wants to own it (at least the rights to it). But yet he in no way is offering to pay for (or even just give credit for) your time/effort. Why would I want to do that?

From my (limited) understanding, putting something in the public domain is not the same as releasing something open source. When you release it open source (say under the GPL), you are saying, anyone can use it for free, just as long as I retain credit for it (after all I did the work). But releasing into the public domain does not have the same "restrictions", its basically just releaseing it for anyone to do anything too.

I agree with you on this Ovid, I would be very hesitant to use this software, if at all.