The Register: Creative threatens developer over home-brewed Vista drivers
by Volker Weber
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 drivers which make Creative's soundcards work smoothly on PCs running Windows Vista. He had posted a link to them on a forum on Creative's website and many users had downloaded them. Without his drivers, users say, Creative's soundcards cause Vista machines to crash or features to fail.
No, this is not an April Fool's.
[Thanks, Ben]
Comments
Volker,
Thanks for sharing.
I, along with all those people in the forums and posting on TheRegister article, have been a creative customer for well over a decade.
Intentionally limiting driver support on a new OS is just sickening. I know people who still use 15yr old HP Laser Printers quite happily on the new OS.
Beyond the idiocy of Creative's position, one wonders what Creative IP was employed? If driver code was merely patched, maybe, but if it was written from scratch?
Obviously, one should consider becoming a creative customer instead of a Creative customer. ;-)
I wonder of the legality if the guy was encourage a DIY method for modifying your own drivers for internal use only :P
Ben, I met the problem with the intentionally limited driver support on a Canon laserprinter and flatbedscanner a couple years ago already. I'll never buy a single one of their products again. Creative just joined this list of mine.
I had this problem with Creative several years ago when they claimed that the SBLive! card I had in my Win98 box was supported under [then new] XP. Of course, after upgrading to XP I found that the new drivers only supported a bare minimum of functions, thus turning a [then expensive] soundcard into one not much more useful than the one integrated in the motherboard. That was the last Creative product I purchased.
How does Creative explain their contribution to the distribution of these drivers by allowing a link to it on their own forum?
Boy, theres a name from the past...are Creative even relevant anymore?
All the machines I've built recently have built in sound cards..none were Creative..and sounded fine to my ears.
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