About a month ago I wrote to Creative Labs, whose products I’ve been using for more than a decade regarding their arguable support for OSS and more specifically linux.
Their response to my comments, although lukewarm, assured me that Creative is serious about supporting OSS, and is contemplating ways in which is can step up its efforts. Currently, Creative Labs support for OSS is quite limited, as specifications for all Audigy cards are only provided under NDAs, the Creative originating EMU10K1 driver provides only basic support for those cards and – to my knowledge – the only effective support that the community is getting from Creative is in the form of card donations once in a while.
An approach similar to nVidia’s closed source drivers seems appropriate if Creative products are to see any use in OSS systems. I guess that is what Creative will (hopefully) present in 2005.
Along with drivers, additional support for Alsa’s suite of applications is sorely needed. Currently there exists no GUI mixer application for either KDE or Gnome with a high quality of service. Creative could easily help there – they’ve got the experience and most probably the resources, judging by the over-the-top applications their provide for Windows.
