Ralph Slooten wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Richard Fish wrote: > >> So, from what you just said and the previous comments on this thread, I >> can assume that Skype only supports the obsolete OSS API for sound? >> Sorry, an 'awesome' product that truly wanted to support linux would >> support alsa, esd, and arts sound APIs at a minimum. > > > Correct. It only supports OSS for the time being. Don't you have oss > emulation enabled? Skype is not the only product to not have alsa > support yet. As for the sound daemons, well that is what the wrappers > are for.
Actually, no, I don't enable OSS emulation, because AFAICT it locks the entire sound card to exactly one process...whether you have a hardware mixing card or not. And the dmix plugin doesn't help. You are correct about many other applications being stuck at OSS also, VMWare being the one that annoys me the most at the moment. But in the VMWare example, sound is not the core functionality of the product, so I can forgive that, for one more version. Wrappers are nothing but a hack. An effective hack to be sure, but a poor substitute for native support. Besides, _every_ open source program that anybody cares about supports at least 2 of those outputs besides OSS. It really can't be that hard! > Correct. I still don't see where the "skype will start charging soon" > comes in though... Well, if that was the specific statement that you objected to, then yes, I agree with your point. There is no particular reason to believe that the product would be withdrawn or the price raised due to increased adoption on Linux. I should point out that I am _not_ in any way opposed to commercial software on LInux. I don't even mind paying for software that provides me with real value, although I _do_ expect the company to make a serious effort. I have very little direct knowledge of Skype (I don't use VOIP, maybe after I upgrade to a nicer cave!), so I am certainly not attacking them or saying they are bad guys. It may very well be that they will bring additional value to Linux for large numbers of customers...and that would be a Good Thing! It's just that with the various things going on in law and technology, from software patents to removal of features through forced 'updates' to DRM schemes, I think we as consumers need to be very vigilant regarding what actions we let companies get away with. Cheers, -Richard -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
