Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers Creative Labs has enraged customers by threatening a developer with legal action after he wrote drivers that allowed its products to run smoothly on Vista. Soundcard maker Creative accused the developer, known only as daniel_k, of theft and warned him not to infringe its intellectual property. Daniel_k has created a number of …
A few people have said "Well Creative are only in it for the money; they have no desire to produce quality goods. That's capitalism."
Which is true at a very superficial level. The problem comes when they produce such utter crap that no one buys their product, so they have no sales and no profit. In capitalism, quality and customer service are means to an end, same as PR and marketing. Looks like Creative have got the balance wrong this time, possibly because of outside pressures.
I remember being on the Creative Forums for years before they eventually released Windows 2000/XP drivers. They had beta drivers out for ages. The releases were few and far between. Creative clearly cant cope with new operating systems. Thank god ASUS and others will be up and coming with new soundcards.
Notice how they havnt brought out anything new since 2006, old Speakers, old sound cards. A company without focus or drive.
Bye Bye Creative.
Same sort of thing happened with the guy who won the MS competition for their junior studio thing.
Most proprietary software is licensed to prohibit reverse engineering. If you don't think that is valid then you have to get software from people who allow you to reverse engineer it.
Most off the shelf software is about lock in, driver software is designed to give a scale on the 'different cards' which of course are actually more physically similar. Long gone are the days of technical excellence in proprietary software, that niche has been taken by the open source crowd.
Let's say that Creative have not fucked up and everything is going to plan.
That means their Vista drivers are crap on purpose.
Of course they don't want anyone to fix them, they are supposed to be crap.
BUT WHY? What possible motive?
Is it to keep vista from gettting better? Surely someone else will have a sound card which works well in Vista.
Perhaps they have a fantastic new product in development which is really almost the same product but with better drivers? Now that would be money for old rope.
On the other hand maybe they are trying to devalue the company ready for a takeover.
Someone once said never attribute to malace what can be explained by incompetance. That is how most people think. I have started to attribute malace where once I saw incompetance. It seems to explain a lot these days.
http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?board.id=Vista&thread.id=30737&page=6
"I checked with management, and it was decided we would bring back the Audigy Support Pack thread and allow you to continue in that endeavor. As long as no intellectual property of Creative is distributed, we will have no problem with it. I will get the thread reposted shortly."
He was asking for donations to support the hours of work he had put into Creative over, what seems to be, many years. He had been modifying their drivers with their knowledge for some time if you read the thread (don't bother)
It would appear that his drivers were enabling features that Creative had deliberately crippled. There is no excuse for this sort of behaviour from any hardware supplier.
There's also something seriously dodgy about this where Creative appear to be charging for Vista software other than drivers for many cards.
http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1726
The Creative forum thread is now over 2200 posts and 227 pages.
I've just been looking around for a new soundcard for use with my new build, but now I know there is a problem with Creative hardware, they are off my shopping list.
(Just in case anyone from Creative reads this I will translate "The negative publicity you have created has just lost you a sale".)
By the way Creative, which particular bit of "IP" is yours that was stolen. Trade secret? Patent? Copyright? I would love to know because I suspect you are using that term as bluff and you are full of p*** and wind, signifying nothing.
Was about to buy
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=SC-000-AZ to replace my Auzentech X-Meridian.
Creatives stupid action has now hurt Auzentech, I appreciate Auzentech products are superior, but they license the product from Creative and I refuse to ever give Creative another penny.
If you have been on their forums for a long time, this sounds familiar. They never got the drivers working very well on XP either for the X-Fi cards. At the time, they were blaming Nvidia for all of their problems when in fact, their were a lot of people complaining about crackling, and very loud popping on not just Nvidia chipset based boards, but also on VIA, and Intel chipsets. I had a VIA chipset board at the time, and they ran like crap. Yet the Audigy drivers worked perfectly. The flaming got very loud, when they kept trying to blame others for their own screw ups, and they closed that forum thread if I remember right. I'll bet there are others on this comments page that remember that. So keep in mind that this is really nothing new for Creative, who has a bloodthirsty history. It just sounds like a class-action lawsuit will be necessary to get them to fly right, since they have no sense of morals.
"Funnily enough, I am currently reading a book called "The Undercover Economist" that explains that behaviour by companies. It goes something like this: intentionally cripple your cheaper/older products so that people have a reason to buy the more expensive ones, in this case by providing sub-standard drivers for Vista."
I still recall with animosity the time when Creative bought its rival Aureal and promptly killed all the drivers for those products. It's like they expected me to buy a Creative product to replace my now driverless Aureal card (which was far superior).
History repeats, just this time Creative is fighting itself.
Countersue?
What the hell are you talking about?
1) They havent sued him
2) he stole their code, modified it and then sold it on. Show me any ligiator who could paint that in a positive light
Why is this so hard for you idiots to understand
This isnt about the nasty old "Big Company" keeping the mas down, its about theft of someone elses code.
Get your heads out of your atrse and actually read up on the facts of what your posting comments on
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