Creative receives some serious community bashing
Things are heating up over at the Creative forum where Creative Labs have issued a statement that forbids the user Daniel_K of providing X-FI sound card drivers for Windows Vista that fixed several issues and provided Vista users with the same functionality that Windows XP users were enjoying.
Daniel_K was also told to stop distributing drivers for sound cards that would enable features that were not intended for them. The community outcry is huge. The thread was started yesterday and it reached page 26 with most forum users vowing to never buy a Creative product again siding exclusively with Daniel_K.
I think the main point that is making it extremely frustrating for most users is the fact that one guy was able to fix driver issues while the Creative driver developer team failed. A smart move if you ask me would be to hire that guy right of the forum unless there is a reason why the development took that long.
The drivers are already spreading on various torrent websites and it seems that this is going to be a public relations nightmare for Creative.
Update: I can't really say if and how the driver issue has been resolved. You may want to visit the official Creative website where you can download the latest available drivers for your Creative devices. If you have purchased a Creative hardware device recently let me know about the drivers offered for your system. Did you run into issues with them or did they provide you with the functionality you were expecting?
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No, he didn’t ask for money, he asked for donations, which were not required to download the drivers anyway. There is a BIG difference between those two things in a legal venue. Also, even if he had required a payment to download, I doubt very much any court siding with Creative on this as they themselves had not and had no intention of developing similar drivers.
The problem is that Daniel_K asked for money when he supplied the drivers. If he would have given it for free I don’t think that Creative would have blocked him.
There’s now a petition to demand that Creative provide better driver quality, stop selling mislabeled products, leave Daniel_K alone and support open source development.
Please see http://www.petitiononline.com/crtvlabs/petition.html