[KillerShots]

I spent most of yesterday cruising around the creative message board... it looks like it's neatly divided into two camps with nothing in between.

You've got the mob of people cursing creative for their actions, and a few non-conformists all doing the exact opposite of what the mob is doing (in other words, mindless and also mob-driven).

For the most part, their board is spammed with one-post users saying they'll never buy another creative card again (probably slashdot users or similar) which may or may not be serious. Heck, there's probably a bunch of people registering under as many names as they can to spam the servers... but it's clear people aren't happy.

Personally, I'm shocked the whole thing was started by a Creative employee... and even more shocked that the forum thread not only still exists but is not locked. Creative appears to have made a huge marketting mistake here.

As far as the letter itself, I think the only thing wrong here is that Daniel_K allowed donations towards his project. If he wrote the drivers from scratch, Creative wouldn't be able to touch him (whether he charged for them or not). What should have happened (had Creative been serious about the donations being the only problem) is that they should only temporarily have asked him to stop distributing, but allow it to continue if he would no longer accept donations.

On the other hand, apparently his primary means of distribution was through the Creative forums... that's just plain wrong.

At any rate, the way that creative is attempting to handle this creeps me out a bit, whether they are within their rights or not is beside the point. I haven't picked up a Creative card in a couple of years... not due to poor performance or bad drivers, but due to missing capabilities. I would have come back had they eventually filled those capabilities in, but now I'm not so sure... personally, if something doesn't work properly on my hardware, I have a tendency to reverse engineer and fix it. If Creative has such a stance towards this, I really have no interest in taking the chance that I may need to reverse-engineer my card and find I've got a law suit on my hands (one I'm sure I could survive and probably win, but one that would take up far too much of my valuable time).