[Openal] openal future

[Matias D'Ambrosio]

On Monday 04 May 2009 12:20:35 Jason Daly wrote:
>
> What's really interesting to me is how the driver has been received by
> the open source community.  After all of the whining and complaining
> that the open source driver community has done in the past about binary
> blob drivers, Creative has finally released a fully open source driver
> for the X-Fi (maybe it's not feature-complete, but the source is all
> there for people to hack on, and data sheets have been released to the
> community as well).  This happened in November, so it's been six months.
>
> I find it really confusing that the driver still hasn't made it into the
> ALSA project (not even a whisper about it on the lists).  Even if it's
> not ready for the newer hardware, it could at least be put into the
> repository.  I've also heard that the OSS driver is not functioning that
> well for many people, and this driver came out even earlier.  After all
> of the complaints and assurances that if the driver were open-sourced,
> it would be better, it seems to be going nowhere.
 I found this link (in a very non-obvious way):

http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10792

There is an EULA that must be accepted to download that says:

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 Is that the fully open source driver? The announcement mentions 1.18 but I 
only found the 1.00 version for download, and with a non-OSS EULA. I haven't 
seen the datasheets but I haven't looked too hard either, I admit; Creative's 
websites' are awkward to use (including the openal section).
 Even the announcement promises less than even the most basic onboard 
soundcard, so it's no surprise that X-fi cards are in the category "avoid 
like the plague" in the OSS world (which consists of more than Linux).