Creative Labs to open SB Live Drivers

Several people wrote to us to let us know that Creative Labs has decided to make the drivers for their Soundblaster Live open source. They made the announcement and also said they will be setting up a CVS/Bugzilla system to aid in development. Jon Taylor, of S3 and nVidia fame, along with several other coders have been asked to oversee the development. Additionally, they confirmed that they are working with Lokisoft to work Environmental Audio and "3D Audio" on the Linux platform. Lokisoft makes most of the uber-cool games for Linux.

Comments

Major Significance for Open Source SB Live Drivers

[Effugas]

Alot of people aren't going to get the significance of this announcement--they'll think, "Cool, another sound card that I can play with on Linux w/o resorting to closed source drivers."
This is beyond that.
The SB Live is based on a single, ridiculously powerful and extremely programmable DSP. Almost all functions the chipset performs are executed in DSP level software, meaning suddenly Linux is getting full specs on a complete digital processing environment.
The impacts of this are substantial. The SB Live chipset is cheap enough that it's a contender for "standard sound" in many machines. Open source algorithms for everything from MP3 encoding to analog synth simulation to the more esoteric, non-sound related stuff(GIMP graphical filters, datastream analysis, etc.) should, if the drivers are clean enough, start popping up over time.
The uses of such a powerful digital signal processor on an open platform are honestly unpredictable at this point in time. While there are hardcoded design issues in the SB Live chipset(most notably, all signals are upsampled to 48khz before processing may occur), the sheer flexibility of this chipset will blow Linux programmers out of the water.
This is truly excellent news, and shouldn't be ignored as a mere fun thing for the gamers to play with. If only 3D graphics hardware was as programmable...or as open.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Creative: Doing it right, for profit

[Effugas]

A bit more thought on this:
Wow, creative is setting up CVS/Bugzilla. They're not merely opening the source; they're not just trying to grasp a bit of extra PR out of the Linux mindshare gods(Taco and Hemos :-). They're actually going the extra mile and providing not only the source but a development environment for coders to come, watch, and learn.
This is amazing, and deserves a retrospective profile in around six months to see how this great, precedent setting experiment panned out.
Of course, Creative isn't dumb. As I mentioned in another post, Creative stands to have their card become the standard DSP component in innumerable Linux machines--their foresight in developing a programmable sound card is very likely to pay off handsomely in increased sales.
The economics of Open Source just got much more interesting.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

This isn't just a Linux win.

[Brandon Hume]

Let's try to remember that Linux isn't the only OS that will gain from this step by Creative. The *BSDs, Solaris, and more will all win. And not just x86 architectures... PCI-based SPARCs, Alphas, and PowerPCs, which Creative never considered "cost effective" to develop drivers for, will finally have an option aside from the horrid on-board sound.

I'm endlessly pleased by this. Now, to work on them to release specs for their DXR decoders and the like. (Give an inch, take a mile. :) )
--
Brandon Hume
hume -> BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca, http://WWW.BOFH.Halifax.NS.Ca/

Ding-dong A3D

[Hobbex]

Yay, this makes me even more happy that I chose a soundcard by A3D, hoping to support competition rather than the market leader, when I bought my computer way back when. A year later, and now those who chose SB Live's have a opensource drivers, and what do I have? A $30 closed source (crippled and buggy) solution from Opensound, and Aureal support claiming they might have drivers out "towards the end of 1999" (though they also claim they will be "more open-source" whatever that means).

Never the less, I am not bitter. It's great that Creative are seeing the light here, and I hope that more companies (cough, cough) could follow in their footsteps. It just feels so wrong that the only way to get good sound support in Linux is to support a huge company with a defacto monopoly in this area. That was sort of what I was trying to get away from...

-
/. is like a steer's horns, a point here, a point there and a lot of bull in between.

It makes sense. Now they see the sense.

[Nerant]

I recall reading in one of ESR's essays that the release of driver source code is a logical and beneficial step for hardware manufacturers: they benefit from having the open source community to working on it, while effectively broadening the range of operating systems their hardware can run on. Hopefully, other hardware manufacturers will emulate Creative in this move towards open source. The point is, hardware companies generally don't make money from their drivers: they make money from pushing their hardware for sale to you, the consumer. I foresee that more Linux users will want an SBLive! now. =)

my 2 cents.

Re:It makes sense. Now they see the sense.

[Tarnar]

Sure, they're seeing the sense like nVidea did. The problem is that its still only Half Way There. Drivers are one thing, specs are another. If I'm reading this right, then much like the nVidea driver, we'll have source we can play with, but no specs. And without specs, just what are we going to do to IMPROVE these drivers?

Peer review is one of the founding points of Open Source software. And while efforts like this are WAY better then nothing at all, without specs there can be no peer review. Lets contrast two recent Big Hardware moves to Open Source, Matrox and nVidea.

nVidea released an opensource driver based on SGI's recently opensourced glx protocol. Right off the bat, you could play Q3Test on your nVidea card.

Matrox released specs for their G200/G400 cards. The driver took a while, but now plays Q3Test. And thanks to the specs being there, the driver is still being added to. The nVidea driver has no DMA, no AGP. The Matrox driver has these. And without specs, they can't be added to the nVidea one.

Anyway, that was my example. My point is that now that we're getting open source drivers, lets push for specs too. We'll end up with better drivers then.

Re:It makes sense. Now they see the sense.

[harlows_monkeys]

Actually, hardware companies do make money from the drivers. For a distressingly large number of cards nowadays, the difference between the cheap model, the mid-range model, and the top-of-the-line model is just the firmware downloaded to the DSP or CPU on the card.

For the non-cheap cards from such manufacturers, it is the drivers that are making them the money.

Re:Creative is getting cooler in my book

[Fizgig]

I will never doubt an AC again. I thought you were lying, but after about 5 minutes I came up with this!!!!!!!


OK, I guess the cat is out of the bag now. Like the article says,
Creative is opening the sources to the existing SBLive (Emu10K1,
technically) Linux kernel driver. The current sourcebase is what would
have been release as beta4 of the driver, with 4-speaker support (stereo
mirroring only at present) and SPDIF output being the main changes from
beta3. Also being released are beta sources for a DXR2 driver which
were donated to Creative by Andrew de Quincey (thanks, Andrew!). The
source for both projects will be released under the GPL. We are
planning to submit kernel patches as soon as possible, after the
open-source development community has had a chance to beat on the driver
sources for a bit and whip them into shape.

Also as the article mentioned, Creative is going to launch an
open-source development support site with FAQs, CVS repositiories,
CVSWeb tracking, Bugzilla, mailing lists, and all the other standard
open source project website services. The site will be up and running
sometime early next week - PLEASE do not overload
developer.soundblaster.com with repeated checks to see if the site is up
yet, OK? We'll announce loud and clear when the server goes live.

So, that's where things stand as of Friday evening. All of us here at
Creative are really excited about this, and we have all worked hard to
get to this point. Huge numbers of people have been asking for the
source since we announced the driver development project early this
year. Many of those same e-mails were from people who wanted to be able
to hack the driver sources themselves. Well, here's what you all have
been asking for all year, and what we promised you back in February.

Happy hacking!

Jon Taylor
Linux Driver Engineer
Creative Labs
jtaylor@creativelabs.com

A Test of Open Source vs. Closed Development

[HomerJ]

After reading the article, it seems that Creative will have two sets of driver for linux. They will have their official "binary-only" driver, and the Open Source(tm) driver.

This is a first. Where a company not only released their source for a driver, but are also making their only closed driver. Creative, and any other company, will see first-hand at what opening up source will do. Because they will have something to test it against with the binary-only driver that Creative is making.

In a couple months, Creative will realease their new binary-only driver and say "our driver does this, that, and the otherthing", and whoever is taking up the Open Source lead will go"our driver does all of that, is more stable at doing it, and has features that you never would have though of"

Let's hope that other companies see the light of what opening up drivers can do. Not only does it make for a better product, but I bet opening the drivers sold about a couple hundred thousand SB Live! cards to linux users that would have sooner pissed on the card yesterday then bought one due to linux support and drivers.

Others should follow

[chazR]

This makes a lot of sense for everyone. Creative makes excellent hardware. Software (drivers) is not their core business. By opening the source under an appropriate licence (I believe GPL in this case), they get access to a all the benefits of open source development (thousands of skilled programmers, many eyes to spot bugs etc)

What they risk is that it makes it a bit easier for their competitors to reverse engineer their products. This is a very small risk. I am sure their competitors are quite capable of reverse engineering without the source.

The benefit is that this could give them a serious competitive edge. Their drivers should become significantly better than those of their closed-source competitors. They also stand to gain a significant amount of customer loyalty from Linux geeks.

This should allow them to increase their focus on producing great hardware.

I am a bit disappointed that they haven't opened the source to their drivers for other platforms. I suspect this is because they don't think there are enough open-source Win32 programmers. I think they are wrong on this. However, with the Linux source it should be possible (not easy, but possible) to write drivers for Windoze etc. if we want to.

I hope other hardware manufacturers follow. I have seen several brilliant bits of hardware totally compromised by shoddy drivers.

Yes, way to go Creative...

[smash_phase]

As you might or might now know, I'm running a
SB Live! under Linux page, I just have some things
I like to say..
A lot of ppl already know, Creative went a long, long way from releasing a binary only kernel specific driver, developing at a slow speed with loads of bugs, towards finally even having a FAQ and supporting CVS under GPL and supporting
people who wants to make their own driver under Linux. I you look at Creative, at first being not willing to provide 4front with the nessary information, to continue development and also not seeming to understand the need of having the source available or chopping up the driver into a kernel independant part with source
and a binary part for the DSP
(just check my page on the details..)
that's a big difference...
And Creative also didn't spend much resources
on Linux, because that's not where to money comes
from (We don't buy any Live Ware 3 or whatever upgrades)
But it now seems like Creative fully changed course and is also spending more resources on this thing (also with hiring Jon Taylor, a very good move) they even are working on finding a way
to support 3D audio or EAX, since Aureal thinks,
that's up to Creative, this is a very important step...
I think this move looks very good, also since
Aureal is also working on Linux support,
it really shows that times are changing for Linux
and that even heavy commercial compagnies like
Creative are realizing this..
This is sure much more than I ever hoped for
and to be honest, after seeing a message that
someone was going to buy a SB Live! because he
saw that there was at least a page that supported
it, was almost a reason for me to dismantle it.
Because I only started this page out of the frustration, not being given any support from Creative (like a FAQ or proper install instructions)..

Manuel Beunder (also going under MBr)

http://www.euronet.nl/~mailme
The SB Live! Linux page

The importance of whining.

[lazyr]

At last!

I'm proud to say that I've mailed SoundBlaster at least twice to tell them politely that I think they should OpenSource their drivers, pointing at other companies doing so, at the ALSA team's (admirable and steadfast) refusal to use the emu10k1 code as long as it isn't opened to the public, and at what they've got to loose (nothing, or close to it).

What they achieve by doing this is, at least, that I won't throw my SB Live out the window and buy a card from a company that's opensourced their drivers. And, as many others have pointed out, it's a public stunt, and probably gives them a feather in the hat on Wall Street as well. I don't care that they didn't OpenSource the Windows drivers, and I think it's appropriate too, as Windows itself isn't particulary OpenSource. Let them have their model, and we will have ours.

What I really wrote in to say is that if you have a piece of hardware, whose spesifications isn't released, you shold go to the website of the companiy that made it, search out the appropriate email address, and write them (politely!) about it, explaining the need, the motivation and the reward. Customer feedback is important fuel for decision making.

After all, without customers....