On 4/13/05, Kapil D. Pendse <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> > I'm not sure I understand. OSS is ( was?) supposed to be GPL, right? How
> > can the license expire?
> 
> Doesn't seem like truly "free", if I'm not mistaken.
> Check out:
> http://www.opensound.com/license.html#TERMS
> http://www.opensound.com/order.html
A bit of clarification....
OSS was and is  a commercial sound solution for unix like systems. 
Their API is truley open and a published spec. They also provide
drivers for various sound cards compliant with the OSS api which are
proprietory and not open sourced. In early linux days lot of sound
cards were not supported by kernel but use to be supported by
proprietory drivers made by OSS.

But kernel did accomodate OSS api for its maturity, and started
creating its own drivers with OSS architecture, these drivers are
essentially free and GPLed.

So OSS refers to two thing OSS api which is open, and OSS commericial
drivers which are closed. OSS drivers that come with kernel are free
and GPLed implimentations of OSS api.

Neways all is irrelevant now that ALSA is quite mature and is the
official sound api for linux kernel.

-- 
BAIN
http://abhijit.adotout.net

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