Submitted by From information posed on the OpenSolaris discussion boards 4Front Technologies plan to offer the source code of OSS v4 under both the CDDL and GPLv2 licenses. “The rumors are true, we’re planning on open sourcing Open Sound (on June 14th). We will be offering the source code under CDDL to Solaris and GPLv2 for Linux BSD, OpenServer etc.”
For some machines I have had over the years, OSS from 4Front Tech was the only thing that worked. I have bought a couple licenses over the years. However, I never felt good about it because of the license. This is good news. I assume they will still sell a “value-added” product.
What do you mean value-added? They have always been the value-added product, vanilla BSD was the regular one.
It’s nice that they’re releasing it though, means we may see some reverse engineering of the important bits and their consequent addition to the vanilla systems.
I’m justg wondering if they will be opening _EVERYTHING_ up, or will they still have a version with some proprietary bits to generate the Green Stuff. For instance, the base system and drivers could be open, but they might keep some kind of “wizard” interface closed that makes the process easier.
Just wondering.
But they’re opensourcing the whole thing (drivers included). The question has to be asked – hwo are they going to make money? 4Front makes more than just OpenSound, so one could argue that with the focus on other stuff, OpenSound wasn’t exactly contributing much to the over all revenue/profit.
Just curious, you didn’t feel good because you did not like the license or because you had to pay for it?
And now that it is GPLv2 – are you ever going to pay for using it?
I felt bad about the license. I always try to use Free software when possible. These were machines I just couldn’t get the sound working otherwise.
And yes, I pay for Free software. I have spent 100’s of dollars on Free software, including Mandriva, OpenBSD, G4U, OpenOffice, Bittorrent, etc, etc. I believe in paying for Free software, either by directly contributing (Paypal links, etc) or by buying merchandise (OpenBSD CD).
free is not Free, and Free is not free.
There is no such thing as totally “free”.
But i agree that the exchange of money creates an opportunity for people to manipulate the market to their advantage though…
I would like to think that in the future, everyone does what is needed to get along for free, thus everything would be free. Although you could manipulate the exchange of services to your advantage as well. So in the end, we would have to stop being greedy to have our utopia.
Thanks 4Front Technologies. Is there a catch?
Yes there’s a catch, it’s not BSD licenced.
“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.”
http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=32401&tstart=0
No there is no license mumbo-jumbo.
Quite some while back this could have made a difference. But since the release of Linux 2.6, ALSA has become the de-facto standard sound system for Linux.
This is a good thing, because ALSA seems to much more sophisticated than the OSS. And it’s still getting better and better.
But since the OSS seems still to be relevant for BSD unixes, this a good thing, tough.
Edited 2007-06-07 21:16
>>This is a good thing, because ALSA seems to much more sophisticated than the OSS. And it’s still getting better and better. <<
Actually that’s a fallacy, the version of OSS in the Linux kernel was based off the original Open source release of OSS in the early 90’s. This was taken closed sourced by 4Front Technologies.
What is been released as opensource is OSS v4.0 quite a different beast from the OSS implementation found in *BSD or use to be found in Linux kernel.
It’s like a couple of years ago comparing a commercial Xserver release to the publicly available ones, quite different animals!
anyone else find the phrase “open sourcing Open Sound” amusing?
kinda like “making lipstick applicable to the lips”
and here I thought OSS was dead. Isnt ALSA better in every way? And doesnt it have an OSS compatibility layer?
Next announcement will be XFree86 is opening its doors to new developers, and will stop refusing all improvements to the codebase. Sometimes its good when someone else picks up the ball…
Linux isn’t the only OS that OSS works on, and ALSA is only for Linux.
OSS has been depreciated/fading in the Linux kernel for sometime in favour of the much more powerful ALSA subsystem. One of the complaints from developers (or so I’ve heard) is the complexity involved in getting applications working with ALSA, and one of the things that has always worried me as a Linux user and application programmer is why Linux doesn’t use a sound subsystem more compatible/in favour with other open source operating systems.
Does OSSv4 address all of the inadequacies that ALSA was created for? It’s interesting that OSSv4 has an ALSA compatibility/emulation layer and promises per application volume control’s (Something I really which i could get on my Linux desktop).
I wonder if we could see a move away from ALSA to OSS in light of this news?
According to their documentation, OSS has a lower latency than ALSA for instance; it is also a simpler library/api which should make writing software for it alot easier – with that being said, however, one could argue that one shouldn’t be writing for the ‘bare bones’ sound system but instead writign their application against an abstraction layer like OpenAL.
We are open sourcing everything except a few drivers for which we haven’t received NDA clearance and are still working with the vendors to clear them.
BSD folks, we are still considering CDDL as a license….so nothing is finalized yet.
As far as how does it compare to ALSA, check out:
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5410#5410
As fas as OSS being dead (from an Mplayer Developer)
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5#comment-77
Why are we doing it now?. Plain and simple, we’ve finally got a big customer who will be paying majority of our bills and we have other products (True Pianos) that are also brining in revenue. We were never averse to open source – we did it with XMMS.
People who say Open Sound is irrelevant, all I want to say is that we’re back and you need to try OSS again….now you don’t have any reason not to. I’m confident that you’ll like what you hear.
I invite you to read Hannu’s Blogs to get the an insight into Open Sound v4.0: http://opensound.com/hannublog/
regards
Dev Mazumdar
This is definitely good news, thank you for your work.
Rehdon
i’ d like to see opensound cddl licensed too
Will 4Front push this new released OSS back to linux kernel ? If not, OSS is dead on linux.
Dear 4front – please can you ensure it is “GPL2 or (at your option) any later version” rather than stuck at GPL2 only forever, which doesn’t offer protection from some patent deals and isn’t as valid internationally as the GPL3 will be.
“””
People who say Open Sound is irrelevant, all I want to say is that we’re back and you need to try OSS again….
“””
Sorry. The Linux world asked for your proprietary bits to be OSS’d, gave up, and moved on, years ago.
For not ever being “averse to open source” you did a pretty good impression of it. That’s OK. Sometimes business requirements align with OSS philosophy, and sometimes they don’t.
But you have to understand that the world moves on and your relevance may be compromised by decisions you have made in the past… for whatever reasons.
You can pretty much forget having mind-share in the Linux segment of the OSS community at this point.
What I will really be interested in observing is what the BSD community has to say about all this. This could really be significant for the BSDs.
P.S. Your links to testimonials would be more convincing if they did not all point to the 4front-tech.com domain.
Except it might be more suitable under a BSD licence to them… oh well.
I’m using SBLive card and ALSA got 5.1 speaker setup and hardware mixing out of the box, but not with OSS.
I’ll see if the GPL OSS can do the same (or perhaps more).
I’d heard that there was some rudimentary X-Fi support in there for a specific type of X-Fi card. That true? Might be worth looking into then.
just wanted to point out that some cards simply don’t work with ALSA. OSS has been the only way of getting my M-Audio Audiophile 192 to work. The Card is not even listed in the ALSA soundcard matrix…
Mati
and you are sure it doesent work? isnt it using the via envy24 chip?
im pretty sure it is supported, there is a slight minor chance that you may have to add the pciid for it to be recognized, though i’ve never really had to do that myself for any devices.
well, on the one hand, this might either allow us to avoid the massive deficiencies of the ALSA project, or spur the ALSA project to rectify them (utter lack of clue as to what distributors, users and developers of software that plays audio want, utter disregard for basic documentation, fascination with changing channel names on established and widely used drivers for no apparent reason). on the other hand, it’s not like the Linux audio ecosystem isn’t a hideous mess already…
sigh.
Edited 2007-06-08 07:37
From many standpoints, OSS is superior to ALSA:
* OSS is not Linux-only, but established standard on more than one OS
* OSS has a cleaner design, lower latency, etc.
* OSS always had better hardware support. I wonder if this has changed in the last years
* Software mixing in ALSA always was an evil hack. I don’t know how good sw mixing in OSS is, though
Major thing that scares me away from OSS (Opensound.org OSS) and make me feel comfortable with FreeBSD OSS implementation is virtual channels- FreeBSD kernel can mix multiple sound sources transparently in kernel and don’t use “virtual channels” like “Open Sound”- /dev/dsp1, /dev/dsp2, /dev/dsp3 or something like that- you have to set every application to his own “virtual” sound card (8 cards IIRC). No such a trouble with FreeBSD sound system. I saw many times ALSA users messing with sound applications and encounters errors like “sound card is in use by other application already” Whiskey Tango Foxtrot!- THIS IS LAME IMHO! Correct me if I am wrong….
OSS4 is capable of the same thing. Fear not. It has a virtual mixer.
Edited 2007-06-08 19:27 UTC
Yes, sure, _except_ that it doesn’t work *that* way in FreeBSD and _FreeBSD_ only. 4front acknowledge this issues but so far little has been done, requiring you to point different sound apps to different dsp*.
Are you sure you’re talking about OSS4?
Nonetheless, it will be open source soon, so I’m sure someone will fix it if they can’t figure it out.
Let’s not be bitter about such great news, shall we?
Sure I’m talking about OSSv4
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2110
FreeBSD native driver works because it is done as in “FreeBSD way” of doing it.
From the thread there, I don’t see anything that says they don’t care. If anything, I see that they are having troubles with how FreeBSD implements something in its kernel and are trying to resolve the issue.
It wouldn’t be the first time the FreeBSD kernel needed to do something differently, see the recent nVidia discussions
Nevertheless, its unfortunate you’re having a problem, but they are trying to resolve it.
This is interesting, I’ve been wondering about porting OSS to Haiku. Haiku has already has some drivers available, mainly for current hardware, and can reuse BeOS drivers, but hardware support is always a key point to OS success.
This could help bring wider audio support to lower audience/niche/toy OSes like Haiku, ReactOS (NT has Ioctl() too :p), AROS, … Hurd? and hopefully help them wider their targets.
If you look at the site:
http://www.4front-tech.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=5410#5410
by 4front-tech themselves, you’ll notice what jerks they seem to come across as (or at least this one guy). Continually comparing the ALSA guys as the borg, and accusing linux distro’s not liking their proprietary OSS system because they are against capitalism. He intentionally mixes up commercial and proprietary.
Not only that, but every comment is moderated. Saying anything bad (for example my simple comment saying that the author is intentionally mixing up commercial and proprietary) is removed from the board. Notice how pretty much every comment is positive and starts with “I fully agree..”
http://developer.opensound.com/