It came out yesterday that Creative Labs has thrown in the towel on its Soundblaster X-Fi driver for Linux and released the source code under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) version 2.
The binary driver Creative initially released for its rearchitected X-Fi sound card technology was simply horrible. It was released extremely late, riddled with so many severe bugs that it was effectively unusable, for quite a while supported only 64-bit Linux, and was lacking any Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) support.
The company struggled to provide a decent Linux driver for the Soundblaster X-Fi line for over two years without much success.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/article.php?story=2008110714441385