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It's not, really. There's rather a lot of bits of it which, when you look at the headers, aren't actually under any of those licenses.
This is also explained on 4front's own licensing page: http://developer.opensound.com/opensource_oss/licensing.html
"Q: Is everything in OSS open sourced?
A: No. There are three drivers that have mosty been written by the hardware manufacturers. We are not permitted to release their sources unless their authors as us to do so.
Also some parts of the envy24 and envy24ht drivers contain some code written under NDA. We have not yet received the approval to open source the code from all manufacturers. So these drivers cannot be open sourced just now. If we don't get the approval in reasonable time we will distribute these drivers with the offending code stripped from the sources.
Finally there are some effects in the old softoss driver that are not included in the source packages. We will make the decision about their future later. At this moment it looks like we will remove the softoss driver from the OSS package so these effects will not be used in OSS anyway.
We reserve the right to include some “closed source” drivers only in our binary distribution if the hardware manufacturers refuse to give the programming specs without NDA. Our policy is to promote open source but not to enforce it. We will let hardware manufacturers to decide if they like to select the commercial distribution mode instead of the open source one with much wider customer base."
This quotes sound like some drivers are not free software but the sound system is. Well we know that there aren't as much drivers for OSS4 as for ALSA, just add those closed source drivers to the missing ones. One should port the ALSA drivers to OSS4 (I know, this might be a lot of work but maybe worth the effort, I dunno).




Member since:
2006-01-06
Err... it's GPLed for Linux, BSD-ed for BSD, and CDDLed for Solaris - isn't this open source?