Creative releases Linux GPL X-Fi drivers (Fudzilla)

Well, TAINT_CRAP mostly flags things to developers (kernel or distro). Remember that Windows for a long time has reacted to crap (uncertified) drivers with big scary warning dialogs, and IHVs reacted by updating their installation instructions to say that users should just click past the scary warnings or worse, they modified the installer to move the mouse and click through on its own. So Microsoft realised that a stick wasn't working and went for the nuclear option - in x86-64 Vista AFAIU users can't click past, they get a dialog saying the driver won't work, and that's it unless they are willing to modify the OS and reboot into a clearly labelled (and unsupported) "test mode" to use the hardware.

So we're not actually kicking Creative that hard for their crap driver compared to other OS vendors. A TAINT_CRAP flag almost certainly won't keep the driver out of Ubuntu or Fedora, and even in RHEL I can imagine a future "kernel-drivers-unsupported" or something package with these drivers in it.