A creative example of the value of free drivers

Creative is a Singaporean company so it can hardly be considered an indicator of how things
are going downhill in the US. 

I doubt it.  A "business decision" does not legally negate that the features were advertised
to work with XP.

Microsoft made substantial changes to the Vista audio API, both in in terms of application API
and in terms of driver API. Plus they added additional restrictions on hardware manufacturers
in terms of things like signed binaries and DRM support. 

Microsoft calls their new audio stuff 'Wave RT'

Ostensively Microsoft made these changes to bring improvements to it's system in terms of
media playback capabilities. Lower latency, better multichannel support, better syncing, lower
resource usage, and that sort of stuff. As well as making their OS more DRM friendly to
support a potential equivalent of 'iTunes for Video'.

This is a big bone of contention between Creative and Microsoft. As a side effect of all of
this Microsoft decided to eliminated the kernel's ability to use hardware to accelerate it's
DirectSound 3D. So Creative is trying to get people to use OpenAL so that they can do their
own drivers for Vista that enable hardware acceleration.

The whole market around Creative stemmed from the fact it was the 'Gamers' card. It was the
only card you could get that had full acceleration and supported all the audio features for
games. It was never the cheapest, and there were cards priced less that were better for audio
editing, but only Creative supported EAX. (and Creative used it's extensive software patent
portfolio to force game makers to support EAX and advertise support for it in their games.)

(personally I think this sort of EAX thing is mostly pointless on modern hardware, especially
hardware with multicore cpus. The 'HDA' standard for onboard sound is probably just as good
when combined with software 3D proccessing as Creative's expensive hardware)


http://forums.creative.com/creativelabs/board/message?boa...

"Creative ALchemy - DirectSound 3D is now possible in Vista!"
http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=7719

"John Carmack: "This sucks.""
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040728-4048.html


This dispute with the modder is probably a combination of him asking for money for Creative's
software, some exec's getting all offended that he is violating the EULA, and him disrupting
Creative's attempts to influence the future direction on game design and irritating Microsoft.


It's kinda difficult for Creative to try to get the gaming community irritated at Microsoft
for getting rid of their HAL for DirectSound3D when you have some joker coming around and
hacking 'fixes' into binaries.

The HDA standard is a huge improvement over the Ac'97 stuff.

I think that firewire and USB stuff is mostly todo with the fact that is the only realy easy
way to improve the audio quality of laptops and such. If your going to do DJ stuff then it's
not practical to carry around a PC tower with a half dozen audio connectors hanging out the
back. And anyways the Macbooks and such are a nice fashion accessory for people who do that
sort of thing.

I still expect that they still cause problems in terms of latency and such.

That seems to be true for some of the features in the modified driver (AC3 encoding), but not
for others.  It seems that the Vista drivers for particular Creative hardware expose fewer
features than the XP equivalent.

Using an operating system upgrade as an opportunity to sell a customer new hardware that they
don't need seems to be the bigger story.  With free drivers, the hardware vendor isn't
required to keep them working for obsolete hardware, but there is nothing wrong with a third
party doing the work (as has happened here with the Vista drivers).

There was a popular 80s multimeter brand that used the same internal circuit board for base
model and deluxe version. A single jumper enabled the upgrade. Of course the markings on the
outside of the case gave no clue that the extra features were available, but they were if you
knew. 

The manufacturer clearly thought that he could make a profit with either model, and that his
engineering costs would be minimised if the two used mostly identical hardware.  Was it legal
to enable the deluxe features that were dormant in the base model hardware that many paid for?
Most thought it was, though probably only a minority voided their warranty and actually did
it. The manufacturer had the good grace (and funds) to chalk it up to experience. He hasn't
repeated the mistake since.

Yes, I think your comment is related to something I was thinking when reading this:

An important question is, how often does this happen in the industry?  If vendors do this
often to promote hardware sales, then yes, that's a good reason for the industry to consider
free software.

However, if this is a rare occurrence, then this story is merely a moving anecdote.
Practically speaking, the industry will not migrate to free software until there is a
compelling economic incentive to do so.  I don't know what the common practice is, but my
suspicion is that non-free drivers basically do a satisfactory job for typical users.

That's a shame, because I think people don't realize the cold, hard business case for free
software.  For certain people in the IT industry (ISVs, integrators, solution providers,
consultants -- especially small ones), using free software heavily or exclusively is a
compelling business model.  The benefits are zero licensing fees and effective legal certainty
about your so-called intellectual property position.  Finally, for small companies, what is a
bigger threat: piracy or obscurity?  For this reason, the intuitive desire to "keep your cards
close to your chest" is bad for business.

(Incidentally, both the "legal certainty" and "obscurity vs. piracy" arguments apply to small
musicians, and that is why you see so many small musicians adopting Creative Commons.)

I don't agree with the contention that it's a mess and has "always been a mess" which suggests
that it's not got any better.

With OSS you had the abstraction in all the wrong places, so often there simply wasn't any way
to do what the user wanted, unless the user happened to want to do whatever the OSS designers
thought you should do (basically, play video games which use 16-bit stereo sound).

ALSA gets more of that right. There's a good chance that whatever my hardware is actually
capable of is reflected sensibly into userspace. I get dB relative amplifier settings for
example, instead of arbitrary "1-100" scales that could mean anything and frequently do.
Recent versions of ALSA finally default to "restore what you can" when your driver updates add
or remove some of the mixer controls for your hardware, which was a huge oversight in older
versions.

JACK gets a lot of stuff right that basically no-one had got right before, although other
modern operating systems are moving in the right direction.

In my experience even (Linux) distribution vendors have got a lot better about audio. Most of
them ship frameworks like JACK so that you don't need to compile anything yourself. They
usually make some attempt to properly set up your sound card, and to restore those settings
next time you use the computer. They will set the permissions correctly for the console user.
In some cases they even remember to grant the console user the new (non-dangerous) real time
quota so that he or she can use pro-audio software without editing text files.

However there's plenty more ground to be covered. Most of the heavy lifting now needs to be
done by the desktop environments (GNOME, KDE etc.), which have traditionally taken the 1990s
DOS game approach of pretending everyone owns a Soundblaster 16 and wants to either play
exactly one music file, or make useless desktop bleeps, or maybe, if they're feeling really
lucky, record a badly distorted or inaudibly quiet 8-bit version of their own voice saying
"Testing". The jury is still out on Pulseaudio, but all the previous attempts at this sort of
thing have been disastrous and I have no reason to think Pulseaudio's developers are any
smarter. JACK makes application developers actually have to care about audio - and that,
apparently, is unacceptable for anything except pro audio software. So, either Pulseaudio will
turn out to finally get this stuff right without making app developers think about it, or
we're back to just ALSA, which at least had dmix working on all the machines I own.

If you're using a properly configured laptop with a pro outboard card and a copy of Ardour
putting together a demo track you could imagine that Linux audio is fine now. But a phone call
from someone who is trying to make the "new mail" sound from Evolution audible - and has been
confronted by forty more or less identically labeled sliders which seem to do nothing - will
soon wake you up to a world where there's a lot left to do. Still, we're closer than we were a
few years ago.

Creative's hardware should be classed into two categories -- pre-Live, and post-Live.  The
SBLive was revolutionary when it first came out, and managed to outlast the competition that
sprung up around the new 3D positional audio standards.  (They didn't kill Aureal when they
bought it; it was already a corpse by that point)

But, like so many other hardware markets, the integration of audio onto motherboards (starting
with the i810 chipset) all but killed the add-in sound market, taking it from a "everyone
needs to buy a basic sound card" to a luxury item for gamers and studio work.

The reasons for people having problems with the SBLive was that it was merely
PCI2.0-compliant; later revs of the PCI spec tightened some ambiguious stuff, and some
assumptions Creative made became out-of-spec, or close enough to the threshold that the
motherboard (and other add-in card) quality mattered.  

Well, that and finiky Win2K drivers, but that was hardly a problem unique to Creative Labs.

But if I were to consider buying a new sound card today, Creative's would be on the list to
evaluate; it's foolish to carry a prejudice based on a product two generations old.

Just because there is a perhaps long period between buying new hardware — significant hardware
purchases of mine were Dec '97, Mar '03, seems like a 5+ year cycle — and thus being most
likely a "past customer" as you call it, this does not mean that I could not be a future
customer of the particularly hardware vendors I am biased towards. That is, unless they make
such a fuss.

I don't 'cherish' copyright law. It has to be tolerated, as the law of the 
land, but nobody says we have to *like* it. (Indeed the GPL license in 
particular is an attempt to end-run around it by producing a pool of works 
within which one can act as if copyright law did not exist beyond 'show me 
the source'.)