Creative Open Sources X-Fi Sound Card Driver…Finally
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Creative has finally come to its senses and turned to the open source community to raise its X-Fi series of sound cards from the ashes on the linux platform, which got burnt mostly due to the poor quality of the drivers that Creative was giving out. The announcement for releasing the source code, licensed under GPL v2, was made on their forums. For the announcement and download details, click here.
I guess this is a reason for us to rejoice because of two reasons:
1. This would definitely make life that much more better as the open source developers fix these particular drivers (ALSA people, start your engines)
2. This also means another big inroads into the commercial world for open source as creative is definitely one of the big boys around.
Now, I wish NVidia would see the light of the day as well. Creative guys, care to take a trip down to Santa Clara to share your reasonings with our GPU brothers 
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This post has 2 comments
November 7th, 2008
I guess open source is a good way of life. Although i have never contributed to it by writing stuff, but i would like to do that
December 23rd, 2008
This is great news, I remember going nutz with Ubuntu to find out when I stuffed in my other media machine X-FI was a no-go. I had to jump thru hoops to get basic sound via OSS alpha drivers.
As for nVidia, you have to at least give them credit. Their binary drivers work great when compared to ATI’s binary or opensource versions. I only buy nvidia now because its just magic in Linux, at least for me so far. In other words I’ll take working binaries over super handicapped open-source ones anyday. In the end, it just needs to work.
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