Lee Revell:
 > It was in response to problems such as these
that I began work on a
> half-kernel, half-userspace system for emulating OSS devices.  It's 
 been
 > a while since I've done anything with it
but if there's any interest 
 in
 > such a system I could put my code (such as it
is) up for download.
 No!!!  That's exactly the wrong approach, it will only encourage
 applications to use the OSS API.  Do you really still want to be 
 using
  the same ancient binary-only
flashplayer/realplayer plugin for 5 more
 years?
 Why don't you ask the Skype developers when they plan to support 
 ALSA?
  Or figure out why it crashes with aoss?
 
 I strongly disagree with you about this. Ross approach sounds like
 whats
 needed. The OSS API is easier to understand and leads to less bugs and
 less programming time. For programs like SKYPE, mediaplayers and other
 types of non-realtime-sound applications, I really think programmers
 should go for OSS instead of accessing ALSA directly.
 And, as mentioned before, ALSA is linux only (except for alsa 0.5 which
 was partly used in older versions QNX I think).
 
 It's just as easy to read() and write() with ALSA as OSS.  And if you
 were designing a cross platform audio app now, OSS would also be a poor
 choice, you would use PortAudio.