14 DAY TRIAL // As I was wandering around on the OpenSolaris Forums not long ago, I stumbled upon a little post announcing an open sourcing of Open Sound. This opening up is scheduled for June 14th and it is said that the project initiators would be offering the source code under CDDL to Solaris and GPLv2 for Linux BSD, OpenServer etc.
Dev Mazumdar, President of 4Front Technologies, writes:
"At this time, we'd like to propose that Open Sound be started as a project under the Desktop Community and should things start getting more interesting, we'll spin off as our own community. Glynn Foster has agreed to be our sponsor. ".
Regarding some possible complications that might occur due to the licensing, Dev also wrote: "For the BSD folks, OSS is going to be GPLv2 + Additional rights (namely linking GPL drivers with BSD kernel). If it's a problem we'll be happy to discuss licensing. The main thing is that we want people to be comfortable contributing patches and code and not feel like their work is being misappropriated."
In the Unix operating systems the Open Sound System (OSS for short) is a standard interface for making and capturing sound. It is based on standard Unix devices. OSS's main purpose would be to allow one to write a sound-based application program that works with any sound controller hardware, even though the hardware interface varies greatly from one type to another.
OSS is now available in many major Unix-like operating systems. Hannu Savolainen started the company 4Front Technologies in order to offer his support for newer sound devices and improvements proprietary. He also motivated the creation of Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA), available for Linux only and with only one implementation of the interface. ALSA provides also an optional OSS emulation mode that appears to programs as if it were OSS.