Creative Says Custom Drivers Are "Stealing," Gets Rocked by Protests

[danrok]

See front page:
http://www.aoaforums.com/frontpage/content/view/4081/1/

Comments?

[Gizmo]

The only real place I can see they have a beef is with him soliciting donations. He is essentially profiting from their work.

That's a moral argument.

From a purely legal standpoint, Creative have a point: because of the way that accursed DMCA works, they are completely within their rights. What's more, if Creative REALLY wanted to be snarky about things, they could tell Linux users that they aren't allowed to run open source drivers with the Creative cards. I don't think they could win that in court, but IANAL, either. In any case, the DMCA takes something that should be pretty obvious and straight-forward and makes it very murky.

[cloasters]

If Creative had half a brain, they would have hired DanielK. Creative's bLOATware drivers for XP bite, they are huGE pieces of garbage.

[dsio]

What a load of crap. Creative ship multiple parts with the same hardware, only differentiated by the drivers because its cheaper than producing multiple versions of the same card. If I wrote a driver that interfaces with that card at the hardware level, providing access to features that exist on the card, then I'm using the hardware as it was designed. I don't see any great difference in this.

I mean, think about this. Intel's E8400 chips are not designed to run at 4Ghz. They do though. The companys selling overclocker friendly motherboards and watercooling systems are profiting off my desire to use a CPU in a manner far beyond its design intention. This could be seen as hurting intel, as I'm getting more from that cheap E8400 than I would be getting from a $1200 extreme edition. Should they sue Gigabyte for selling a motherboard with built in overclocking features?

[Favu]

I think this is going to end up like windows, you don't OWN the product, you merely have a licence to USE it...

bastards

[funnyperson1]

I agree with cloasters, they should be hiring this guy, not suing him. If they dedicated themselves to making non crappy drivers and actually innovated with their cards they could be a profitable company. People have been complaining about Creative drivers for years, how hard is it for a company to see that a restructuring of the software department is required for their survival. Whereas the gaming hardware industry seems to be thriving with new companies popping up every day, Creative is slowly dying despite EAX being the only player on the field.

[dsio]

Update:

Creative have gotten the message, and done their best to retain some dignity while giving in and allowing Daniel_K to go on doing what he's doing. It seams that the fact that in the last few days, the company has had what could be described as one of the worst public relations disasters in internet history, and threats of a mass customer boycot got through to higher management the fact that if you treat your clients like scum, they will treat you similarly.

Here's the link, in which Dale, a Creative forum moderator backpedals on the previous company line, and goes on after being prompted to say that he will check into the matter of Daniel_K taking donations for his hard work and respond soon.

Re: I'm quitting the driver/software modding - read official statement from Creative - Windows Vista - Creative Labs

[Daniel ~]

Stop buying their crap and watch them blow away on the next breeze! Really, when we are all done talking there is this:

Will we put up with it or say no? When we start saying no...they start kissing our asses like you can not belive...they are in love with money, our money, we own them, we just don't realize it ...yet...":O}

[Redroar]

Turtle Beach FTW!

[Daniel ~]

C-Media! ":O}

[dsio]

I'm back to using my EMU 0404 (creative owns EMU) in my main machine. I tried out the Intel HDA onboard audio.

What can I say about the intel onboard...
Rubbish.
Crap.
Tinny.
Worthless.
Featureless.
Dull.
Terrible.

Would have thought after all these years they would have figured out how to make a sound card. Guess not.

Anyone remember those Nvidia SoundStorm Nforce 2 sound cards? How completely freaking awesome those things were compared to every onboard sound card marketed before or since? I think alot of us were thinking back then "Damn, they've finally done it, from this day forward, onboard audio won't sound like a bus driver farting at you from down a drain pipe"

But then... back to crud we go.

[dsio]

Tell you what, the EMU0404 is likely going in a media machine, so I'm looking at another card at the moment, and the ASUS Xonar D2 is looking really attractive. I seriously can't find a single bad review, and most are saying quality wise its better than the X-Fi.