Creative cracks down on Vista driver modder

Posted at: 5:19am 31st March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Daniel Kawakami's drivers get EAX working on Audigy cards in Vista for free, but they're 'in effect stealing' says Creative

A volcano of vitriol has erupted on the Web after Creative cracked down on Daniel Kawakami’s modded drivers for the company’s sound cards. After posting his alternative driver and software packages on the Creative forums, the company’s vice president of corporate communications, Phil O'Shaughnessy responded publicly, explaining why Kawakami’s threads had been removed.

The problem, according to O'Shaughnessy, isn’t the principle of creating new drivers, as long as it’s made clear that they’re not supported by Creative. However, a major issue arises when ‘technology and IP owned by Creative or other companies that Creative has licensed from, are made to run on other products for which they are not intended.’

‘If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others,’ says O'Shaughnessy, then ‘that is a business decision that only we have the right to make.’ The main issue is that Kawakami has been including support for features that Creative didn’t intend to enable on certain cards.

An example is Creative’s Alchemy software for Audigy cards, which is included in Kawakami’s driver bundle. This enables the sound card’s EAX surround sound features in games in Vista, which are otherwise unavailable because Vista doesn’t include a hardware abstraction layer (HAL). Creative usually charges $10 US for this software, and describes Kawakami’s bundling of the software as ‘in effect, stealing our goods.’ The Vista driver bundle also includes the Creative DVD Audio software for Audigy 2 cards.

A major slip-up on Kawakami’s part is that he was asking for donations towards the development of the driver bundles, which O'Shaughnessy described as ‘profiting from something that you do not own.’ Of course, Creative is theoretically perfectly within its rights to knock this on the head. However, the post has resulted in a major backlash on the Web from Sound Blaster owners who feel that the company has misled them on Vista-compatibility.

A petition has already been set up here, which requests Creative to rethink its move on the drivers, and it already has 1,601 signatures. Among the petition’s demands are that ‘Creative will cease selling mislabeled [sic] products which do not notify the user in a large, easily noticeable typeface of features which are unavailable in popular consumer operating systems.’