Hi everyone,
 
and interesting thread has been going on the olpc devel list.
It would be interesting to get your comments on one
of the statements that were posted there (I'll
leave you to check the thread on the list archives
http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/devel/).
 
This particular e-mail goes (in response to me asking why they
were complaining about alsa and asking for OSS:
 
"OSS in general, or OSS on Linux? He did say "OSS 4", which is
the current version of the API. Solaris and all *BSD use it,
along with random SysV-like things. As far as sound on the
UNIX-like platforms goes, OSS is the standard. Probably it
ought to be proposed for the next POSIX/UNIX standard.

You can read Hannu's take on the matter in his blog. This
entry is particularly informative, but note that the code
has since been released under the GPL.
http://4front-tech.com/hannublog/?p=5

More on the ALSA defects:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/7/6/397

Basically we got swindled. ALSA has not been the utopia that
it was claimed to be. ALSA sucks. It's not even documented."
 
Hannu's text sometimes reads as propaganda. But it would be
nice to hear the opinion of other developers. As far as I am concerned,
for about five years now I have not even looked at OSS anymore.
But should I reconsider?
 
Thanks
 
Victor