Creative Backs Down on Vista Driver Debacle

In the wake of last week's driver debacle, Creative has finally decided to back down for PR purposes. Modder Daniel_K, author of the offending Vista drivers, has had his posts on the Creative forums reinstated. According to Creative the move was to avoid infringing on other company's IP. "Daniel_K is incensed by Creative. 'They publicly threatened me, just to show their arrogance,' he told El Reg by email. He told us that Creative contacted him on a chat session. 'They were sarcastic, ironic and asked me if I wanted something from them, as if I were expecting something,' he wrote. 'It was my protest against them and would like to see how far it would go.'"

first post!

modded illegally by the community!

Good for him

The way Creative publically handled the situation was so stupid they deserve the continued bad publicity.

Re:Good for him

Seriously. It is so close to the corportate equivalent of "dumb suicide" that it should deserve a Darwin Award

Re:Good for him

I kind of wish they would die, if only so we wouldn't have to let down so many disappointed people who bought Creative's X-Fi and Audigy hardware thinking it would be a good card for home recording only to find out that it utterly sucks at it. Between the high latency and all the post-processing it does to make the sound "better" (much of which is apparently hard to turn off), it's about the worst possible choice for that use, yet Creative seems to market it as though it would be good for that. Not to mention that the sound quality on the inputs just isn't up to snuff compared to even the cheapest M-Audio hardware.

At a minimum, the company deserves the corporate equivalent of life in prison without parole for the number of people the company has harmed with their product claims.

Re:Good for him

It would definitely be nice if Creative died - or at least got some decent competition. It's a good example of a market totally dominated by one company that churns out crappy stuff. I know a fair bit about their EAX technology from personal experience, as I tried to patent a 3D positional audio technology in the mid 90s. Aureal beat me to it, but they folded. I think their IP ended up with another company called Sensaura. They're gone now too, and their site directs to ... Creative.

Still no true 3D positional audio through EAX either, just some hackneyed binaural cues. It's a shame, but I guess that's just how the stone rolls.

Re:Good for him

Some of those geeks work at places like universities and large companies and make purchase decisions. Others give advice to less knowledgeable people.

An important thing to note here is that a dedicated soundcard is no longer a necessary component of a computer due to onboard sound. A large part of Creative's market are going people who decide on their own to buy a soundcard for some reason, and which card they choose will depend quite heavily on some geek's opinion.

Onboard sound = poor ASIO

Onboard sound is fine for most applications, but it is not suitable for audio enthusiasts such as musicians who need low latency ASIO. The ASIO implementation on most on-board chipsets (that I have used) is atrocious to the point of being unusable.

Re:Good for him

The assertion from the previous poster basically meant "You can have a working, full featured computer without having to care about buying a sound card, a bit like you can do the same with network cards".

Last time this subject came up, I said that onboard sound was more than good enough: multiple people proved me wrong, and indeed, i was, so I'm not going to try and argue that. However, point is, for 90% of people, the computer will be functional as is. Games will run fine, their MP3s will play fine (and I can't hear any noise introduced by the board during playback, and its quite limited and hard to notice during recording... of course, not viable for professional work), everything will be "good enough" to the average joe (as opposed to videocards, where even Joe will realise really quickly that his onboard video isn't good enough when he can't even run a 3 years old game on his machine).

So that means that ALMOST EVERYONE who buys a sound card, knows what they want. Low noise, professional features, instrument ports, specific encoder/decoders support, and they'll want quality (and the tone of your post is quite in line with this statement).

So Creative cannot sell shitty feature-less cards easily. They have to have a LOT over an onboard card for someone to want it.

Re:Good for him

If you'll look I think you'll find that the downloads for his work number in the many 10's of thousands.

So I doubt it's just a few angry kids.

Backing down or CYA Manuver?

Given that NVidia is getting nailed with a class action lawsuit because of handicapped drivers, I have to wonder if Creative's withdrawal is less a product of PR and more of fear that they could be put in a similar court situation. I mean, punishing someone because they release un-crippled versions of your drivers kind of spotlights your company for having crippled drivers in the first place - the basis of the nvidia case.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

does it really matter whether they were trying to save face, or trying to save their asses in court?

Either way, the Internet has yet again handily shown another large corporate entity that 'do no evil' is a pretty damned good motto.

That once letter to the local paper editor gets millions of reads these days. Despite their efforts, many businesses and their practices are transparent to the public whether they like it or not. The "blowback" from that is what some like to call 'market forces' at work :)

Google was rather bright to call everything beta, and only put a line through the word when everyone was happy with how it works. When you produce products and make claims of a general nature and have no clear plan with how to deal with those inevitable questions from reviewers and users... well, blowback is the natural response.

Trying to hush up the competition is ... er... illegal. Trying to hush those that would expose you to the competition is essentially the same thing, and quite the example of not 'don't be evil'.

It's just a shame that the folks at Creative had to fsck it up like this when they could have created a PR positive experience of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

I'm pretty sure that the lesson is "don't do evil in ways where you stand a good chance of getting caught. Do lots and lots of evil (if it's profitable) in areas where you're not likely to get bad publicity/legal action out of it.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

You never know when you might get caught, so the actual lesson is "don't be evil".

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

You're forgetting that some Slashdotters have been taught that there's some law requiring corporations to be evil as long as there is profit in it. After all, if it's in a documentary it must be true.

Re:Backing down or CYA Manuver?

I prefer a "always do evil" philosophy. Sure some people may get mad at you and you may get bad PR etc. but "do no evil" is boring. "Do evil" is a great way to ensure that things stay interesting.

Think about it...

Where would Slashdot be if Microsoft was not an evil monopolistic corporation ?

Where would Slashdot be if the RIAA were not suing grandmothers and college students ?

Where would Slashdot be if Jack Thompson was not suing video game manufacturers ?

Where would Slashdot be if Creative released Vista drivers that work ?

You see, by being evil you effectively bring life to the Internet. Without evilness no one would have anything to bitch about and everyone would be too busy watching porn and looking up peach cobbler recipes. FUCK THAT!

screw creative

Fire the people who badgered him. No, not the legal folks, they're just doing their due diligence, but the PM's who decided it was okay to actually harrass and intimidate the guy.

An apology and an announcement of a policy change from here forward would also work.

Otherwise, all I see is that they got caught and decided they'd just try other means to shut down unauthorized, uh, "unbreaking". There's also the whole deliberate breakage to begin with.

As things stand right now, my only outstanding question for resolving the Creative debacle is "Turtle Beach or m-Audio?"

Miserable excuses by Creative

They just grate on my nerves, saying that their drivers are hung up in the Vista approval process. I'd say that they are just buying time to release new products so they can make more profit off of NEW product instead of spending cash on support for old. The pattern shows in the forums as well as their support pages.
I've seen more than a few companies simply bypass vista's certification process and release their updates, with instructions on how to circumvent Vista security checks. Good for them, bad for vista.

Let's be clear here

While I respect his skills, Daniel_K didn't actually write replacement drivers that did things Creative couldn't...he reverse engineered the existing drivers and patched out the OS level checks, or he swapped parts of code from other drivers into play, to enable features that were specifically disabled by Creative. He then made those modified, repackaged drivers available, which is a big problem for Creative, and the reason why they tried to shut Daniel_K down.

They ought to start by...

shitcanning the VP who approved this stuff. Publicly. Then issuing a public apology.

Anyone who gets this heavy-handed in today's internet society is far out of touch with his/her customer base, and has no reason to be employed by a company that makes computer equipment.

In other words, incompetent to the point of being actively harmful to the well-being and even survival of the company itself.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

Umm, Creative's HQ was based in California. The EULA Creative had on those driver was NULL AND VOID by California. Daniel had EVERY right to modify the software as he saw fit. I pointed this out to Creative's Lawyers, and they capitulated VERY FAST.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

I'm curious as to the foundations of this. You state that he had the right to modify the drivers, but did this give him the right to distribute them? And since Daniel lives in Brazil, how does this affect the EULA?

Mind you, I think Creative was a complete asshat over this, but the legal basis still intrigues me.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

The EULA is still null and void, and many courts have found an EULA to be unenforcable, especially in the state that Creative's headquarters were in - California. There's legal precedent all over.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

That's not how copyrights work. By default, you have no right to do anything with someone else's copyrighted work. It's only through a license agreement that you have any right to even use Creative's code. If the EULA is entirely null-and-void, then there's nothing else that gives you right to use it. Note that certain portions of an EULA wouldn't necessarily hold up in court (technically, they could say that you must sacrifice your firstborn on the Temple of Sho'ka'rei, but that doesn't mean it'd hold up in court), however there has to be something that gives you the right to use it.

Mind you, that all means nothing in the court of public opinion. While Creative might have had the legal right, their actions made them look like senseless bullies. It would have been far more productive to give the guy a job and release his changes officially.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

Are you sure you understand copyright? You buy a book, you don't need a seperate license to read it. That's what you got by paying for the book. Software is no different, and when you buy a creative product you're buying hardware AND software.

Now, he doesn't have a right to distribute the software, but he probably has a right to distribute changes to it. If i tell my friends to read a book, and come up with a different ending, I'm allowed to tell them about it. I wouldn't be allowed to sell the book with one chapter replaced or anything.

What he should have done is release a program that changes a few bytes in the original file, not release a modified file. But your notion that you need a seperate license to use something you bought is obsurd, and I can modify the software all I like in the privacy of my home.

Re:This doesn't happen with free software

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Care to explain how constitution, or a constitutional law of Daniel_k's states prohibits him from distributing patches to Creative's drivers, provided that he neither distributes patched drivers directly nor do the patches contain Creative's copyrighted code in excess of fair use amount needed for interoperability.

Now, it's possible that Daniel did not release his work properly, but he sure has "powers" to modify Creative's code.