Creative Vista Driver Modder Speaks Out

hol writes sends a followup on Creative Labs shutting down the modder who made their drivers work with Vista. Wired is running daniel_k's response to the contretemps."

Comments

Except that it's their strategy

[an.echte.trilingue]

Except for that the drivers appear to be broken on purpose. The installer checks to see if it is on Vista, and if so it turns off certain features or replaced working drivers with buggy ones. All he did was disable the checks and replace the Vista drivers with the XP ones. According to TFA, the company has said "that whether or not it cripples its Vista drivers is a 'business decision that only we have the right to make.'"

Looks to me like they are trying to cash in on the Wintel upgrade cycle for no good technical reason: "Oh, if you want to enable all of Vista's advanced features, you need to buy this card over here."

Bastards, but probably bastards who will make lots of money.

Re:Is this real?

[mikael]

Wasn't Creative the company that refused to give ID Software any developer support at the time when ID Software was a startup company. As a result they refused to support Creative in any way whatsoever?

Creative retracts forum post.

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative has replaced the original threatening post on the forum with a very defensive one http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332 Chunks of the original post are still available on the Wired.com article. Here's a smart guy who archive the original post http://www.woyano.com/view/7839/Archive-of-Creative-Labs-Letter-To-Community-Modder .

Gave up many years ago

[Brit_in_the_USA]

I went through SB live and incompatibilities with very popular VIA chip sets.

I bought a Audigy (1) and never got the firewire port working or any drivers to work since XP SP2.

For years I had been annoyed at the rubbish that installs with the drive CD's and how the GUI is totally at odds with Windows.

I switched to Diamond (with DDL optical output) and Via sound cards (24bit / 96kHz) for a fraction of the price. I haven't looked back, updates are available for vista and they work just fine.

Due to my bad experiences with Creative and driver support I actively steer clear of *any* product they make for over 5 years and advise family and friends to do the same.

Re:Is this real?

[croddy]

Creative won a patent on the algorithm known as Carmack's reverse, which the Doom 3 engine uses extensively. To avoid patent license fees, Id shipped the Doom 3 engine with Creative's EAX shit in it.

see: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040728-4048.html

Creative have responded...

[Shemmie]

Creative Forum

We have read the strong feedback about Creative's forum post regarding driver development by Daniel_k and other outside parties. Creative's message posted on our behalf by our Company spokesperson tried to address our concern about the improper distribution of certain software which is the property of other companies. However, we did not make it as clear as we would have liked that we do support driver development by independent third parties. The huge task of developing driver updates to accommodate the many changes in the Vista operating system and the extensive testing required, including the lengthy Vista certification requirements for audio, makes it very difficult for Creative to develop updates for all past products. Outside developers have been very helpful to Creative and our customers by developing updates for many of our Sound Blaster products, and we do support and appreciate these efforts. This however does not extend to the unauthorized distribution of other companies' property. We hope to work out a mutually agreeable method for working with Daniel_k in supporting his efforts in driver development. Going forward, we are committed to doing a better job of working more closely with third parties to support their development for our products and our customers.

Re:Is this real? - Umm yes

[xSauronx]

torvalds said it himself:

Clickity

I get asked a lot, which this probably won't surprise you, why doesn't the kernel have a stable device driver ABI?

Linus Torvalds: Well, there's - the lack of an ABI is two-fold: one is we really, really, really don't want one. Every single time people ask for a stable ABI, the main reason for wanting a stable ABI is they want to have their binary drivers and they don't want to give out source and they don't - certainly don't want to merge that source into the stable kernel or the standard kernel.

good article, short read. enjoy

Re:Obvious.

[Macthorpe]

How is this insightful? You clearly didn't read the article at all.

Creative broke parts of their Vista drivers even though those parts would have worked fine. The modder re-enabled them and Creative threw a wobbly. This has nothing to do with DRM or media companies, and the only link to Microsoft is the OS the drivers were written for. It has everything to do with Creative forcing an upgrade path on their customers.

Good work on writing a comment with all the buzzwords necessary to look insightful, though.