Creative and Corel bet on Linux Desktop Development

Milpitas, California, and Ottawa, Canada, 16 December 1999 - Creative Technology has entered into a strategic alliance with Corel Corporation to add Linux support for SoundBlaster Live! and Personal Digital Entertainment (PDE) internet devices, applications and services.

Under the agreement, Corel's upcoming Linux-based suite of applications will be tweaked to support selected Creative products, in the form of Linux device drivers, for the Nomad line of portable MP3 players, the WebCam Go portable web cameras, and SoundBlaster Live! audio cards. Said Sim Wong Hoo, Creative's Chairman and CEO: "Just last month we released our first open source driver for the SoundBlaster Live! family of cards running on all major Linux kernel versions, and it has been embraced enthusiastically. Our Linux support is the next step in our long-term PDE strategy to ... expand the scope of personal computing to encompass the latest innovations in digital home entertainment technology." Linus Torvalds, creator of the open source and increasingly prominent Linux operating system, feels Creative is helping to further entrench Linux as a commercially viable alternative operating system.