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FWIW, Hannu has disavowed the comments about runtime licensing and said that the "common interpretation" of the GPL will be followed.
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Judging from the discussion over at Insane Coding and what you guys have been addressing here as well, two things stand out as currently being problematic:
i) license: is it Free or not? Do different licenses apply to source and binaries? License issues *always* have to be settled before distros can depend on large projects like this.
ii) sleep/resume: does OSS4 work on a laptop that goes to sleep a few times a day? Has someone around here used it on a laptop in this way?Comment
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The binaries have a few drivers in them that have not been open sourced (due to NDAs). However, distros don't need the binaries. Fortunately, the binary-only drivers are for one or two very rare cards.Originally posted by korpenkraxar View PostComment
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About licensing:
What this means is that we can decide to license OSS under some other license if we wish - eg. lets say Google comes out with a Google Public License for their operating system in the future. 4Front can basically say, we license OSS under the Google PL. This has NO bearing on the GPL licensed version but essentially since we are the original developer we reserve the right to relicense any code under another license - so basically GPL isn't the highest license authority of Open Sound.
We are no longer in the proprietary business - instead we are in the community business. We want to serve multiple communities that may not fall under the same license - so 4Front license supercedes all other licenses.
When you work with the GPL'ed version you don't care about the other licenses. You are given 100% rights under the GPL. There is no exception in GPL'ed version OSS what so ever. You can contribute your changes back under GPL but if you want it to appear under the Open Sound master repository - you would need to sign a OSS contributor agreement under which you would relicense your work so that all other licenses benefit (including GPL).
The contributor agreement is basically a mashup of the Fedora CL and the Open Solaris CL.
THis is our policy at 4Front and we apologize if there has been any miscommunication.Comment
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I don't know if you've noticed, but OSS4 looks like a dying project:
The architectures are bogus? Won't fix HDA and X-Fi? This covers about 95% of all new sound chips out there!There are three main problems with OSS at this moment
1. Nobody is paying anything for “free” software. [...]
2. The current sound card architectures like USB, FireWire, HDaudio and X-Fi are all bogus. [...]
3. Practically all legacy OSS/Free applications are seriously broken. [...]
[...]
However what I will probably NOT do are:
* Fixing the USB audio driver. [...]
* Also fixing the HDaudio driver [...]
* SB X-Fi [...]
* [...] get the legacy OSS applications fixed.
These are the words of a dying project. OSS support is failing while ALSA is still going strong. The choice is pretty clear at this point.Last edited by BlackStar; 23 June 2009, 09:06 AM.Comment
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It's not dead yet though. Maybe its user base is keeping it alive, but without more developers, the future doesn't look very bright.Comment
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Nobody mentioned it yet, but OSS 4.1 supports per-application volume control.Comment
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The last time I checked, OSS4 had problems with sleep, and one had to run the 'soundoff' script before sleeping and run the 'soundon' script after.
Lennart Poettering is irrelevant to this thread, just like he claims OSS4 irrelevant to Linux.It seems to me like one of the kill Lennart Poettering Threads, his stuff isn't working for me.
Off-topic: libcanberra is a nice replacement for esd when using the gstreamer backend, so there's no need to kill Lennart.
From what I've seen, the OSS4 threads on Ubuntu brainstorm generally get voted down.Maybe Ubuntu brainstorm will be good place to give OSS4 more attention?Comment
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