Submitted by “4Front Technologies is proud to announce the release of the source code to Open Sound System v4.0 under the BSD license for FreeBSD and other BSD compliant operating systems. OSS is a cross platform API that provides drivers for most consumer and professional audio devices for UNIX and POSIX based operating systems, including Linux. Owing to its open architecture, applications developed on one supporting operating system platform can be easily recompiled on any other platform. Open Sound System is also available for Linux under the GPLv2 license and OpenSolaris under the CDDL license. It is also available for commercial and proprietary operating systems under the 4Front commercial license.”
This *is* good news. Go 4Front!
Not to sound like a fanboy, but OSS just is the standard for sound under any unix (or unix clone). I hope Linux ditches ALSA for this. The reasons I prefer OSS over ALSA are mostly practical: OSS is *the* cross-platform standard API that everyone knows and implements (as standard as BSD sockets almost, but then for sound), and the documentation is way (and I mean way) better than ALSA’s.
Thank you 4Front!
Edited 2008-01-08 23:55
I Have to second that, although you should take my opinion with a ton of salt, since i know pretty much nothing about the implementation details of both.
I would just like to see an unified system under which every *nix system could be programmed for sound without too much hassle.
Way to go!
Meh – ALSA is technically superior.
Yes, OSS is a great sound architecture with great documentation and all apps support it.
I do not know why Linux still keep this ALSA shit, while OSS is avialable, even at their beloved GPL2.
ALSA documentation, is as good as Linux documentation [very poor], check options.c for more info …
No idea…
Oh wait, maybe because emu10k1 works in 5.1 configuration -out of the box- on my Audigy 2?
Or maybe because the nVidia HD sound works in 5.1 and 7.1 configuration, again out of the box, on my Gigabyte/Athlon64 combo?
… And I can continue. (~30 different configurations)
Alsa may not work for you, but it works out of the box for me – on a -large- number of machines/configurations.
(Well deserved) sarcasm aside, OSS will closed source when Linux switched to Alsa.
OSS is ~4 years too late.
– Gilboa
Edited 2008-01-09 16:17 UTC
ALSA was a dream come true! OSS was so hard to configure, even to configure the 5.1 speaker config or something as simple as the Treble/Bass.
So I say, unless OSS changes, it’s never going to be the default in Linux.
Your post is irrelevant “Quake”.
OSS is the de facto “Unix audio” standard.. most Unix systems either have their own OSS emulation layer, or a commercial licence from 4-front.
Now that it’s BSD licenced, OSS emulation layers can be improved.. or even replaced with the actual 4-front code base.
Linux is the entity that always seems to break with tradition.. it’s as if Linux developers don’t think twice about “Cross-Unix” portability.
Idiots..
You operate under a false assumption, the assumption that Linux is in any way a Unix. It’s not and is not trying to be, that’s why it ignores all real conventions. The Unix-likeness of Linux was useful when Linux was trying to become popular, at the time it was Unix-enough and free, and that remains the case, but that doesn’t mean it’s trying to be Unix.
BSDfan, I’m talking from a customer point of view and my experience was better with Alsa than with OSS.
If OSS can be better at handling the simple sound configuration, good to them. But for now, Alsa has the lead.
Not everybody is technical.
The GPL and CDDL rather limited the comercial, proprietary use that could be made of OSS by parties outside 4Front. Now with a release under the BSD license, 4Front have esentially given away the ability to use OSS in closed-source products, while not getting anything for it. In one fell swoop, then just did away with their business.
The GPL did, the CDDL did not (not from any practical standpoint).
Yes, I’m sure they didn’t in any way at all investigate the different options and instead let some random engineer make the decision.
And how could they have forgotten to consult the business model experts at the OSNews forums?
Read here.
http://www.4front-tech.com/hannublog/
It seems that they killed their revenue by going to GPL/CDDL. So BSD shouldn’t hurt more.
The grammar in the comments section is horrible, but it has some funny moments. It’s like the lolcats were giving advice.
“Let Red Hats acquires you.” ^__^
BSDL hasn’t really hurt ISC’s business. Nor has it hurt the Kerberos, Apache, or X11 people. If a company holds the primary expertise in a field (like ISC has for BIND, ISC DHCP, and so on) then revenue opportunities will follow.
A software author need not control the users or redistributors of their work in order to make a living.
Well the damage is done and alsa will probably stay. The problem with oss is that after maintaining it for linux the author went commercial, which is not bad thing by itself but it is rather a huge disadvantage to have to pay for an essetial part of the operating system, especially one that is distributed under gpl2. I don’t know the details, but i’ve heard the alsa architecture is not pretty either but thank god threre are alot of audio abstraction libraries out there.
This is good news, however its too late for linux, we needed this 5-7 years ago, now ALOT of effort went into alsa, and i doubt very much linux will ditch it, even though we might wish it.
There are a couple ways to spell, “licence,” the English way, and the American way, “license.” The, “c,” and the, “s,” are changed depending on one’s dialect. However, “lisence,” is not one of the ways to spell, “licence.” [See article headline.]