“Yes Creative is acting adversarial, but what you must understand is that

Daniel_k had no right to modify Creative's software. They did not grant

him the right and he was not using an OS that granted him any rights.

People need to start purchasing products which give them the freedom to

use the product. What I'm saying is that when you buy a product you

should especially look for one feature: freedom.

http://fsf.org For more information about software freedoms please see

the Free Software Foundation's homepage.”

---------

Assuming this is addressed at creative: “you have lost a customer for life, and furthermore, I am informing every last person who will listen to me not to buy ANYTHING from your company.”

----------

“You cannot feel anything but disdain, they have been exposed for what they have become.

A shame, I used to rate their gear for quality.

Now I will avoid them like the gathering legions of consumers who they have ripped off.

Maybe they have a skills shortage, but that's no excuse for their shoddy treatment of a benevolent talent.

That, and flipping the big one to everyone who put money into their paychecks.

If they do not care to respond appropriately, then sorry but they must feel the backlash and be a lesson to other players.

Greed will be their downfall if they continue to front this.

Please continue the good work and help them GET THE MESSAGE.

Do not let them have the satisfaction that they can do this without serious damage to their enterprise.”

------------

“Hey there

I read about what Creative did and I fully agree that it's a stupid action and a loss to

everyone involved. My problem is that I already boycott Apple and Sony, boycotting

Creative too means there aren't any decent people left to buy MP3 players from, my last

(Creative) one recently died (after a long a great life). I've seen various projects to

make your own players, but most lack a decent menu system.

Why can't we have companies run by the GNU folks with the help of the folks at EFF with

labour done by FOSS developers? Now that company would kick ass.”

-----------

“Hi there,

Here is a forum post which has constantly been updating itself. Feel free to use the info.

http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=1915513

Warmest regards”

--------

“When my Audigy wasn’t supported under vista I told everyone who would listen not to buy creative products. I even went as far as making my girlfriends friends return a creative mp3 player she got her for xmas saying that if a new operating system came out the mp3 player wouldn’t work.

I’m glad a site was launched to share my aggravations with what I once considered a good company. “

----------

“To start off I’ll give a little of my experience with Creative, which I admit is limited. I have a Soundblaster Audigity Live Platinum card in my PC which is running Windows XP. I have been using it for over 5 years, and I don’t plan on replacing it until it dies. However, on the topic of recent events, I find it very offensive that a cooperation would lack the decency to provide services for which it has advertised are available for their products. Furthermore, when someone does come along and assists those in need with his own solutions, they try to count him as a criminal.

Now to look into the issue a little more:

Daniel_K is considered to be stealing based on the fact that he is providing access to portions of the hardware that Creative did not intend to allow users access to on particular versions of their hardware. This in my view is appalling in that I, as a customer, have paid for the product and everything included with that product. I know many companies have similar lockout keys, so they only have to run 1 item, and just unlock what they feel like unlocking. In my view if I paid for an item, I want to have full access to it. If they have to run different lines for separate units to ensure people are getting exactly what they pay for then so be it. At least we would know that we are getting exactly what we paid for.

Also, if a person is capable of making something better then the company that is producing it can, would it not be in the best interest of that company to seek employment of said person? Even if it is simply to put a better face to the public as having a product that actually works, rather then a product that someone not under the influence of the company can improve upon so easily. Thus in my view Creative should have been seeking to employ Daniel_K instead of denouncing his activities, and labeling him as a thief of intellectual property.

Daniel_K was providing a free public service for which Creative should have been providing initially. If they are not happy with what he is doing, then they should show that they can and will provide what the end user requires in order for their products to be usable on newer machines, and older machines alike. As a post on the consumer.com site has already said:

“By way of comparison, another forum poster, Igor_Levicki, points out that Nvidia supports its old cards much more reliably:

‘Let me just remind you that for example NVIDIA still supports GeForce generations 5, 6, 7, and 8 in their latest video drivers for XP, XP64, Vista, Linux and Mac OSX. All those old cards still get performance improvements instead of being crippled.’

Again I say I do have a Creative product, and I do plan on continuing to use said product. I will, however, be looking at other options when my current item finally give in to time.”

----------

“Hey,

I was just checking out your boycott site. I once put up a boycott

site a lot like yours for a very similar issue. It's no longer up,

but you can still see it here on the Wayback Machine:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021113022956/http://boycottblizzard.org/

The design is nothing great. (what design?) Anyway, I never bothered

to actually write to Blizzard about the petition or the site to see if

they would do anything. To be honest, I don't think they would have

cared. For one thing, Blizzard was owned by the huge conglomerate

Vivendi and I'm fairly certain they wouldn't have cared. One thing I

learned later though is that a boycott is a tactic. It's an action

that you use to try to get the company to do something (or stop doing

something) you want.

My site had a quote from Ross (one of the developers of bnetd) and his

original call to action was to boycott Blizzard until they allowed

third-party servers. My complaints were mostly about the DMCA.

You site says "until they can get their act together."

I think one weakness of my site was that I never really got a "group"

going. You might want to make sure and get some kind of group (I

don't know, Yahoo Groups maybe?) so that people can be part of it, so

you can come together as a group and contact Creative and say, here

are some things you can do to end the boycott, whatever that might be.

I hope you find this advice helpful.”

--------

“Creative, by trying to save a penny, ended up losing a quarter. It's good that they are interested in saving money, which not many people nowadays know how to do, but they are going about it the wrong way. I am a musician, and I cover a lot of songs, and have been asked multiple times to add a donate button to my website; I am not against them giving me money, it's just that I don't really want people to have to pay to hear the music I make. I am not 'requesting' donations from them, but if they would like to give me money, they are free to; that's why it's a donation. Creative is trying to control the way we spend our money.

As a musician, I quite enjoyed the Sound Blaster 16, mostly for the Yamaha OPL-3 FM chip on it. People are just trying to enjoy the Creative products they have bought. They have trusted Creative's words, and Creative betrayed their own customers out of greed.

Daniel has devoted his free time and energy into serving the customers in ways that Creative was unable to, free time and energy he could have spent working at his real job. He isn't charging for the driver downloads, is he? This is an attitude Creative should adopt, if they are *really* about the customers. If people are wanting to give money to Daniel out of their own gratitude and free will, then they should be free to. Creative, these customers already gave you their money for your products. -Their- money, the money they are free to spend as they please.

I guess I won't be picking up a Creative ZEN like I thought I would, or an X-Fi, or any other Creative products, at least not anytime soon..

By trying to save money in an issue that didn't really matter, they ended up losing a lot more. That was just plain dumb.”

-----

“Thank's for putting up the site! I started boycotting Creative when I bought my X-fi over a year ago. I just assumed they would have drivers for linux like every other peripheral I bought to build a new rig (including a PCI-e Megaraid scsi card). The Vista debacle is indefensible.

The real problem is Creative's apparent monopoly. Suggest, on the website, alternative manufacurers that do not use Creative chips. Or better yet, open it to the public to offer suggestions. A company like Turtle Beach could really get a boost from this and be a real contender to Creative.

The scary part is the Creative chips imbedded on motherboards. Need to make it clear to Mobo manufacturers that Creative is NOT the company of choice for consumers.

Great work!”

-------

“Does anyone remember the Squeal of death that emanated from the Creative

Audigy sound cards? High pitched squeal and Windows crash even with the

latest drivers and software. Yeah, that made me run out and get products

from Turtle Beach and Auzentech. And I recently purchased a Dell monitor

with built in webcam (made and supported by Creative). I returned it the

next day due to software that wouldn't run properly (i.e. full

functionality of the webcam), and the software also made my XP machine

slow to a snails crawl with herky jerky mouse movements. Never been

happier than with Auzentech soundcards and logitcech webcams! At least

their software works and is continually updated.”

------

“I haven't bought Creative for years now because of what I believe to be their inferior software under virtually every Windows release.

However, under US IP law Creative literally had no choice in taking a formal action.

If Creative failed to take action to protect its Copyrights and Patents, then under US law it would lose them...they would become public domain.

However, they could have done things differently.

Personally, if I were running Creative, instead of stomping on Daniel_K,  I would have probably considered working out a way to license the guy to do what he was doing, bring the already modified and distributed code under a non-exclusive license using his terms and conditions (assuming he had some) as the vehicle to do so, and then re-visited the entire situation once all the IP got under proper legal control. Of course, it would as well depend on how receptive to the idea the guy was about it.

If something couldn't be worked out, only then Creative would by necessity have to come down so hard on the guy.

For all I know, that's what happened...but I doubt it.”

-----

“This site should contact other sound card companies and get their details, and offers of open drivers and post them on the site to show people they have an alternative[.]”

-----

“I've just seen this chart that Creative use for advertising their X-Fi sound.

http://images.asia.creative.com/images/inline/products/xtreme_audio/xfi_graph.jpg

I have studied sound engineering and that is probably the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen.It is technically not possible that MP3s sound better than studio quality(whatever those soundengineers at creative think that is).

Creative is a bunch of liars!!!”

(Thanks for your image contribution!)

-----

“I can't believe its taken Creative Labs this long to piss off more people.  Anyone remember Aureal?  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aureal_Semiconductor  They were a major competitor in the sound card market in the late 90s.  I had one of their cards, it was cheaper and better than anything Creative could come up with.  Well eventually Creative sued Aureal into bankruptcy, they then bought the remains of the company, and... nothing.  No more support for anyone with an Aureal card.  This was right before Windows 2000 was released, so if you wanted to upgrade you needed a new sound card...  and who was left in the high-end sound card market?  Yep.  I reluctantly bought a Sound Blaster Live card and it gave me nothing but problems.  Complete waste of money.  I had to buy a lesser card to even be able to play everything I wanted to.  So ever since then I've avoided anything produced by Creative Labs like the plague.  I hope they go bankrupt just from their own behavior.”

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