"Patrick Elliott" <sel### [at] rraznet> wrote

>OK. I am all for IP. I am less for some moron telling me that I, or
>someone else, can't alter it to make it work right. Mind you, his
>mistake may have basically been suggesting donations, but the rest of
>just 100% total and complete BS.

Almost every single hardware manufacturer (most visible are CPU/GPU
manufacturers) as well as almost every single software manufacturer sell
crippled versions of their goods under different SKUs. It's their wares,
they can not only chose to not develop certain lines for all markets, but
they can purposefully cripple equipment or software to sell to lower priced
markets. If reverse engineering is explicitly prohibited, third parties can
not re-market such goods by undoing the crippling or adding more
functionality. I don't exactly know what he is doing, if he's patching their
(Creative's) drivers, that's a no-no. If he's writing his own from scratch,
without using any of their protected code (very unlikely, I'd say), then
Creative has no leg to stand on, except that they are not of course
obligated to provide free advertising for him on their own forums. It's hard
to feel sympathy for the big guy, but how would you feel if someone was
reverse engineering the lower priced version of your software to enable its
advanced features and thus wreaking havoc with your pricing structure? How
would you feel if time limits on your shareware version were being patched
out? Business is not charity and businesses are not obligated to provide
everyone with everything technically possible, to their own detriment.

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