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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."
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I doubt $146 is really going to make Creative any richer. I think it's more of an insult than a profit.
So while I understand Creative's beef about messing with their software, the reason this is a firestorm issue is that since the software in question is a driver the hardware becomes an inseparable part of the equation.
And this leaves aside the whole other issue of crippling.
A-Bomb
It's way at the bottom of TFA but
"Alchemy: My last ALchemy release (1.00.08) was completely unlocked and could be used with any sound device from any vendor."
So the reason why they shut him down was he released a version of their software that would enable advanced creative only (software) features to say, work on an integrated sound driver. His bad, and he did that as a result of creative 'removing' all links on their support forms to his (working) vista drivers.
According to his words in TFA he's still modding but 'not the forbidden mods' that creative really was upset at him for doing.
He's lucky he's in Brazil, I guess.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
The person "modding" the driver has a license to use that driver. The person receiving the driver must have a license because they have a creative labs card.
So, there is no "infringement" here.
Daniel should phrase what he does better, he isn't getting donations for the "driver," as this is a free download and already licensed by creative. He is getting donations for the "work" of modding. In other words, he is being paid for support not the driver.
Thus he is not running afoul of any IP laws. He is lawfully applying his expertise to private customers running third party hardware and and software, which they have the right to use.
I didn't recognize the name but "Braziliantech" did ring a bell. He did some pretty good mods for Asus's A7V BIOSes.
Ok, I just had to chime in here... I happen to do audio development for a gaming company. Make no mistake, most on-board audio is absolute crap. The drivers very often have glitches/bugs, missing features, or simply emulate "hardware" features (badly) in the driver. Creative's X-Fi lineup is one of the few decent audio cards still available, and that's a pretty small percentage of our consumer base anyhow. Generally speaking, about 75% of our customers have on-board audio, with the remaining 25% scattered among add-on cards. The X-Fi has perhaps one or two percent of the total.
That being said - the future is software processing anyhow. With multi-core machines being standard equipment on all new machines, it makes sense to simply devote part of a core to audio processing, and screw the hardware and the many, many troubles it causes audio programmers. Vista doesn't support audio hardware acceleration anymore (Creative wrote their own OpenAL pipeline to get around this). Our upcoming game will probably only support hardware acceleration on X-Fi class cards. Anything else, it's simply not worth it, and we'll switch to software mode.
I'm not condoning Creative's actions by any means. It seems pretty obvious that they're a bit panicked about the tanking sales of PC audio hardware, and so are making idiots of themselves by irritating their few remaining customers. Stupid...
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I believe the situation is that Creative licensed certain technologies from Dolby for use in Windows XP, but they haven't ponied up for the licenses for use in Windows Vista. Since the guy is posting the drivers in Creative's forums, Dolby could go after Creative. Creative took the steps necessary to stop a possible lawsuit.
None of this would be an issue though if Creative would just pay for the licensing though. Jerks.
It's a shame Creative bought E-mu. I sold my upgraded Proteus 2500 the day they sold out.
My experience with Creative (post-SoundBlaster 16) has been nothing but horrible. The Extigy was one of the worst abortions in computer hardware history. It was marketed as a pro-level 24-bit external sound card, but really was no better than the junk sound cards you can find sitting on a pile at a flea market. And while one version of the driver (also unofficial at the time) was capable of offering the 24-bit capabilitiy the box so boldly proclaimed... I believe the hardware secretly only ran at 16-bit. And it would have constant dropouts any time the host computer would do any disk or network activity... and it was a new computer. This was because there was basically no capabilties in the box -- it was all just host-based. There wasn't even a significant buffer onboard, so all it took was a tiny bit of lag on the USB bus and it was stutter-city.
A friend also had an Audigy back around this time, but didn't know where the driver disc was. Creative had only driver updates available online -- you had to purchase CD copies if you wanted at the original. I guess this makes sense considering their idea of a sound card driver is bloatware too big to download.
Don't get me wrong... they allowed me to hear speech for the first time on my 486 in Wing Commander III, but they haven't made a difference since then. I'm really glad they're getting all of this well-deserved negative publicity. They just plain suck. The only reason they're still around is because of brand recognition. Hopefully now they'll start to be recognized for what they really are... crap.
I guess if all you listen to is taco farts played through a kazoo, they're probably right for you.
Move all sig!
I have read all of the threads here: http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=soundblaster&thread.id=116332&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
/. account many years ago while sitting at my desk at Creative Labs Inc. 1523 Cimarron Plaza, Stillwater, OK 74075. 405-742-6655.
and here: http://creative.edited.us/
Creative summarily wiped their VP's Original posting from their forums that started this whole epic saga. Good thing somebody mirrored it all here: http://creative.edited.us/page.php?start=1
In summary, here are a few key points (in no particular order):
(1) Creative may have licensed some software for Windows XP and NOT licensed it for Windows Vista. Thus that is *in part* why they crippled it. (and it helps promote new hardware sales for Vista) It seems this is true for the Dolby portions of the code.
(2) Creative stated they cripple their hardware (depending on what model it is) in their drivers based on the Operating System version and what the item was sold as. They state they have the legal right to do so.
(3) Creative stated that anyone re-enabling features (however it is done) is "stealing" from Creative.
(4) Apparently, the Windows XP drivers ignore the Vista "Protected Path" DRM killswitch flags and work quite well. (Recall that Vista is built on Windows XP technology and WinXP drivers *can be made* to WORK FINE in it. It is probably very likely that this violates some NDA from Microsoft to Creative as it likely bypasses their DRM mechanisms in Vista that were not included in WinXP (at least up to WinXP w/SP2).
(5) This is pissing people off in a major way. There are people planning on never doing business with Creative again: http://boycottcreative.com/BoycottCreative.html and http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/BoycottCreative
(6) Creative is not doing very well (at all) financially (Gee, I wonder why?): http://www.creative.com/corporate/investor/ and http://finance.google.com/finance?q=OTC%3ACREAF
(7) A Driver "Modder" known as Daniel Kawakami (AKA "Daniel_K") found ways to re-enable 'features' for certain product Creative lines under Windows Vista, notably restoring the Full functionality on the various Creative Hardware under Windows Vista.
(8) This modder also made their Alchemy software work on non-creative sound products too, likely pissing off Creative more.
(9) The modder asked for donations for his freely available work, he acknowledges that was dumb, and pretty much everybody dumps on him for it.
(10) Many Creative Forum posts have been deleted (redacted) and many are available here: http://creative.edited.us/deleted.html
Interestingly, I created my
Those of you whom also worked there probably knew me, you certainly know the above address and phone number all too well. You had the job while you were in college, learned skills, and happily left around graduation time.
I am not here to badmouth or flame, just to say that I was completely unsurprised when this came to light. I could not believe the VP's posting and how he is clearly so out of touch with the reality of Creative's die-hard customers, their motives, and their sense of loyalty and fairness. He has probably lost the company hundreds of thousands of dollars with that single post if not more!
IN some people's opinions, Creative has now firmly placed itself on the path to be considered as clost to "The customer is always right." as the likes of Microso
I used Windows XP when it came out, and the fact that most Windows 2000 drivers would work in XP helped quite a bit. Besides, there is little doubt that upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows XP was a truly worthwhile upgrade, even if you had to chuck your crappy ISA sound card.
I suppose that I am a little bitter because both my scanner and my expensive printer didn't come with workable Windows Vista drivers. I'm not the only one that feels this way. If you read the Microsoft email from the class action Vista lawsuit you'll see that several Microsoft VPs had similar experiences. We aren't talking about ISA sound cards either.
On the bright side my wife hated Vista so much that I was finally able to get her to switch to Ubuntu (where the printer works flawlessly). That's worth the price of Vista for me, right there.
What I find truly curious is that so many Windows users apparently don't mind if their hardware doesn't work with Microsoft's new operating system. You paid good money for this software and there basically is no good technical reason that this hardware shouldn't be supported. After all, Linux manages to support ridiculously old hardware.
Either way, it's more than somewhat hypocritical to dismiss Linux for hardware compatibility issues, and then fail to point out that Microsoft faces many of the same problems with new versions of its software.