On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Darren Reed wrote:

> In some email I received from Andrew Nesbit, sie wrote:
> [...]
> > 1. Firstly, ALSA is under the GPL, and so a port could not be merged
> > into the source tree.  An LKM would be the only way around this.
> 
> ALSA is an API.  It should be possible (slaves willing ;) to do an
> implementation from the ground up that supports ALSA without having
> to worry about the GPL.

Yes, that's what I was thinking too, but later down the track.  I was
thinking that it might be a good starting point to port it as a set of
LKMs, kind of a proof of concept or reference implementation, and then
reimplement the API and drivers, etc under BSD license and merge it
directly into the kernel source tree.  The API is still yet to
stabilise, anyway.

> Although I am concerned that ALSA is a replacement for OSS, so who's
> to say there won't be a replacement for ALSA in Linux 2.6 ?

ALSA has been officially merged into the 2.5.x kernels, and will
replace OSS as the recommended sound API and drivers.

> Looking at the web page, I have one thing to say: the documentation
> about the API's (library & kernel) is utter crap.

It is truly pitiful, isn't it?  There is no way I would want NetBSD's
name on documentation of such poor quality.  That's why part of my
plan is to get involved with writing good docs.

-Andrew