Creative - Copyright info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Creative_logo.svg
[Phoronix] reports that Creative Labs has decided to license their binary X-Fi drivers under version 2 of the GNU General Pubic License.
Creative’s X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.
The Creative XFiDrv 1.00 driver supports the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, XtremeGamer, Fatal1ty, Platinum, Elite Pro, and Titanium series. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording, and ALSA mixing. The current limitations for this driver are external I/O modules not being supported. The announcement was made on the Creative Forums and the full source-code is available for download from their support area (it is named XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz).
More and more companies are seeing the light and freeing their drivers. NVidia is really starting to stick out lately.
November 7th, 2008 at 14:14
It’s good to see them follow in the footsteps of ATI. Seriously, I hate how these people wait for someone else to do it first.