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 -- ______________________________________________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List: (plug-mail@plug.org.in) List Information: http://plug.org.in/mailing-list/listinfo/plug-mail Send 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for mailing instructions.