Mario: > Thing is this, OSS is regarded to be the red headed stepchild in the Linux > world, > _but_ it's APIs are preferred over the messy ALSA (which offers OSS > emulation). > Everyone still equates the real OSS with the ancient code still left in the Linux > kernel.
Competition is good. People will start to appreciate the new OSS more when it is more ready for public consumption. Sun is probably to blame for it taking so long. > Anyway, from what I've gathered, especially with the announcement of > Pulseaudio > being integrated into Ubuntu 8, everyone holds high hopes to it. If it's API is > clean and usable, maintenance on OSS plugins in various applications > might stagnate in favor of Pulseaudio ones. What doesn't help is that the > project leader is "coincidentally" also spreading FUD about OSS. My understanding is that few applications are being written to PulseAudio. I believe even the PulseAudio maintainer recommends that applications not use the PulseAudio API directly but instead use it only indirectly via pluggable mechanisms like GStreamer. These same pluggable interfaces tend to also support OSS, so the existence (or not) of PulseAudio should be mostly invisible to end-users or people compiling code. Since OSS has many of the features that PulseAudio provides, these pluggable interfaces can simply make use of these OSS features when using their OSS plugin, rather than needing PulseAudio. I understand PulseAudio makes the most sense when you decide on a design where all audio programs all redirect their output through PulseAudio. I believe Red Hat and Ubuntu are hacking everything from esd to GStreamer, etc. to forward output to PulseAudio to achieve this. I'm not sure this design makes a lot of sense on Solaris, especially since OSS will provide many of the benefits that PulseAudio already offers. Brian
