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Creative GPLs X-Fi Sound Card Driver Code
An anonymous reader writes "In a move that's a win for the free software community, Creative Labs has decided to release their binary Linux driver for the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi and X-Fi Titanium sound cards under the GPL license. This is coming after several failed attempts at delivering a working binary driver and years after these sound cards first hit the market."
I eagerly await any driver that is smaller and faster and takes up less resources than Creative's.
Nuclear engineers build weapons. Civil engineers build targets.
Seriously, what possible financial/business gain is there to have creative hide these things? Are they really worried about other companies stealing their driver ideas for their hardware? I know graphics drivers can potentially (or used to anyways) have a large amount of optimized code that could _maybe_ be beneficial to competitors, but sound cards?
Perhaps this is a sign that Creative are fearing for their existence. I mean, with high quality onboard audio (7.1, dolby etc) now pretty much standard on even budget motherboards, aren't the days of buying a separate soundcard history now?
Other than musicians perhaps, I can't think that anyone, even gamers/power users would still consider a separate soundcard as a 'required' upgrade, or even necessary at all.
Just a shot in the dark, but maybe they had 3rd party stuff in the drivers and they couldnt legally GPL it...Dolby Digital, etc...and then they removed it now so they can? Just a guess.
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GPL. So BSD coders will have to rewrite it from scratch.
This is better than nothing, but worse than good documentation and worse than a BSD driver (that could be merged to BSD and GPL licensed operating systems).
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The same kind that would require using REGEDIT on windows. Screw that troll, linux is as ready as any other consumer OS on the market. The consumer mass just been too much hammered into that win32 thinking shape.
Bingo.
The year of the linux desktop will never come until "making everything work" for 80% of the population requires precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files. And that most google searches for help end with instructions telling the user how to fix their problem or get their whatever working must also use precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files.
This includes hardware, common to obscure applications, common customizations etc.
If you have to edit a text file, your software is not ready for (l)users.
Question everything
This would've allowed for easier inclusion of the driver in BSD systems, without any threat to Creative — whatever extra freedoms are granted by the BSD-license compared to GPL, they are useless in the case of a vendor releasing a driver for their own hardware.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Unfortunately, that's a very narrow argument. For power users -- yes. Having a command line is awesome. As I've said in other posts, I quite enjoy tinkering with linux and doing the research, it's fun for me. But for 98% of the population, they don't *want* to touch that. They want their OS to work. They want it to install smoothly, have the drivers, have easy to install programs (which even ubuntu struggles with), and work. They don't want to have to get into the guts of the OS. Since the discussion is about taking linux 'mainstream' -- that is what I'm talking about. Most people are monkeys who like pre-fab machines.
I agree with you. What bothers me is that I've seen this conversation about 50,000,000 times on this site:
A: Linux isn't very good at Foobar.
B: Windows is just as bad at Foobar!1!!!
Notice how person B totally and completely changed the subject while simultaneously missing the point. The point isn't how good Windows is at it; in fact, the original poster didn't even *mention* Windows 90% of the time this conversation happens. The point is that Linux isn't very good at Foobar and should be better at Foobar.
Mac OS X users don't constantly compare themselves to Windows; I could go on "macosxhints.com" and post, "wow, the interface for Spotlight in Finder sucks ass" and I won't get 47 replies that all read, "yeah, well, Windows search is worse!!11!." For some reason, the Linux community does that constantly. It's annoying, it should stop.
It's logically impossible to build an OS better than Windows if you only work on problems until you're "as good as Windows" at them. If the Linux cared about making a usable, supported, real alternative OS, they wouldn't do this constant penis-measuring about Windows and they'd start working on it.
End rant, sorry.
Comment of the year
If /. had stickies, this would be a sticky.
How would someone afraid of the command line fix this kind of problem in Windows? If the user is the kind to be afraid of a command line, they are probably one of those users that need help when anything substantial goes wrong.
I bet said user would end up asking for help from someone else.
So, in light of that, how is it any different between Linux and Windows? Both have problems, and both can be a pain in the ass to fix.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"Folks get a Linux machine and it is just them,Google,and a big scary CLI."
hm.. I thought I somehow inadvertently retrieved a cached page from 1998, but that doesn't make sense 'cause you mention "Google" ...
For the people I think you might be talking about, right-clicking on anything is approximately as scary as the cli.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love