Creative bans driver modder for improving its products for it

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We’re going to try to think like Creative here. Let’s say we, as Creative, insist that our drivers for our multimedia cards were Vista-ready. Let’s say they really weren’t, they were buggy drivers with missing features. Let’s say we had no real plans to fix this. We’re a large corporation with better things to do.

So let’s say a talented, independent developer takes it on himself to patch the buggy drivers to make things all work well in Vista. Let’s say he even posts links to these patched drivers, which he’s giving away to our customers for free, in our support forum.

This happened. And Creative, instead of certifying his drivers and rewarding him for his hard work in making our customers happy, has banned him — and other users — from the forums and took down the links to the superior drivers.

That’s just bad customer service.