[LAD] Source code for Open Sound System now available under GPLv2 and CDDL 1.0

[Hannu Savolainen]

Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas wrote:
> On Thursday, 14 June 2007 00:41, pete shorthose wrote:
>   
>> On Thu, 2007-06-14 at 00:42 +0300, Hannu Savolainen wrote:
>>     
>>> Hi folks,
>>>
>>> Now it has happened. Open Sound System is finally open sourced.
>>>       
>> http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5
>>     
>
> Quote1:
> 	"However the ALSA API is still almost completely undocumented 
> 	(after three years of it’s release) so how can anybody expect 
> 	that programmers could develop good applications based on it."
>
> Quote2:
> 	"For the above reasons the benefits of OSS are widely ignored:
> 	[...]
> 	* It’s fully documented (OTOH some parts of the documentation 
> 	are still under construction)."
>
> Yeah. The ALSA API is also fully documented, but some parts are still in a 
> work in progress state...
>   
Interesting. Is there some document that explains how to use all the 
1500+ functions exported by alsa-lib? I know only the doxygen source 
listing but I would not call this API documentation.

However the above blog posting is not necessarily valid any more. 
Takashi has released the salsa library after I wrote it. It's certainly 
good development if all the dead code could be removed from the ALSA 
library API by replacing it with a new one that has just the functions 
that are actually necessary (used by more than one application). Now it 
looks like that no known applications are using majority of the stuff 
exported by alsa-lib.

> What happened to MIDI/sequencer?
> http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=6
>
> Quote3:
> 	"The real problems started few months after that when I tried to 
> 	document the sequencer/music interface.  [...] Due to lack of 
> 	time I gave up but promised to write the documentation later."
>
> Quote4:
> 	"The bad news is that there is no MIDI support in OSS 4.0. There 
> 	are few bugs in the MIDI code and we decided to ship OSS 4.0 
> 	without it [...] MIDI support will be included in OSS 4.1 
> 	(hopefully within this year)."
>
> OK, lets talk about MIDI after some months.
>   
Let's do so.

Best regards,

Hannu