An interesting situation is developing with the Creative soundcard community in response to Creative’s decision to stop a non Creative employee from distributing modified Creative drivers to enhance user’s Vista experience.
A user on the Creative forums going by the handle Daniel_K has been modifying the standard Vista drivers provided for various Creative soundcard’s to ensure that features supplied in the driver build actually work on user’s Vista systems. Features such as Decoding of Dolby® Digital and DTS™ signals work fine when installed on a Windows XP machine but the vista driver counterparts do not.
Many Creative soundcard owners have taken up arms against Creative for this with declarations that they will never buy another Creative product again as a result of this decision. The official forum topic is laced with angry users who feel Creative deliberately fixed the Vista drives to not be completely compatible and thus ensure when new ‘Vista’ soundcards are released users will be forced to upgrade. The argument being how could one person make the drivers compatible when a whole Creative team could not?
Creative’s reasoning however becomes more clear when you consider that Daniel_K, whilst providing the fixes for free, has been requesting donations for his contributions. The implication written by a Creative representative in the forums might suggest that Creative was put under pressure by its partners to stop this actions due to fear over IP. After all it is Creative and its affiliate’s IP that is being used in the drivers and the modified drivers are still for the most part Creative software. Any negative effects of these drivers could reflect poorly on Creative should they cause problems on hardware they were not intended for.
“By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods. When you solicit donations for providing packages like this, you are profiting from something that you do not own.”
This statement taken from the official statements sums up the Creative standpoint quite nicely.
Personally I’m not sure where I stand on the matter. One the one hand it seems ridiculous that Creative would step in and shut someone down who is enhancing their product for free. Then again by asking for donations he is walking a very fine line of stealing and putting the Creative label at risk.
Personally I’d just hire the guy and put him on driver support 
The official Thread
