The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls (i.e. POSIX read , write , ioctl , etc.). The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver (or a collection of device drivers) for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
35-403: OSS was created by Hannu Savolainen and is distributed under four license options , three of which are free software licences , thus making OSS free software . The API is designed to use the traditional Unix framework of open(), read(), write(), and ioctl(), via device files . For instance, the default device for sound input and output is /dev/dsp . Examples using the shell: OSS implements
70-461: A aoss userspace program that works by intercepting systems calls directed to the OSS device files. OSS/3D is a plugin for music players, which acts as an audio postprocessing engine. Supported players include Winamp , Windows Media Player (9 or later), musicmatch, Sonique , Foobar2000 , JetAudio , XMMS . It is ported to Windows and Linux platforms. Unlike the OSS, it is shareware . 4Front OSS3D
105-414: A commercial edition. Not confirmed, but highly plausible: 2) brand promotion, and 3) thwart forking attempts / stifle unsolicited external code reuse. 2) Speculative: Diminish the influence of FOSS enthusiasts and vigilantes, who could interfere with a commercially guided development process. De facto relegation to work on small-scale peripheral complements, which not need to be open source. Only
140-406: A commercial environment. In this scenario, one option is a proprietary software license, which allows the possibility of creating proprietary applications derived from it, while the other license is a copyleft free software / open-source license , thus requiring any derived work to be released under the same license. The copyright holder of the software then typically provides the free version of
175-580: A few months after these friction points were observed, a new fork of the SugarCRM Community Edition was announced. A second use of multi-licensing with free software is for license compatibility , allowing code from differently licensed free software projects to be combined, or to provide users the preference to pick a license. Examples include the source code of Mozilla Application Suite and previously Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Firefox , that have used tri-licensing under
210-484: A former coffee shop and hired additional staff to sustain their burgeoning user base. These early hires included Al-Riaz Adatia, Nicholas Vinen, Pol Llovet, and Tony Million. After talks with both Yahoo and Lycos , in 1999, Mediascience was sold to Lycos for US$ 38.8 million . Terra Networks, S.A. acquired Lycos in mid-2001. Shortly after the acquisition, the Sonique team began work on Sonique 2, intended to become
245-597: A highly stylized aesthetic with an animated menu , which could be customized via skins . Additional functionality includes a basic playlist editor, several visualization modes via plug-ins, a 20-band equalizer with spline-based level adjustment, and a control set featuring pitch, balance and amplification adjustment. It supported MP3 , MP2 , Ogg Vorbis , WAV , MOD , XM , IT , S3M , Audio CD and Windows Media Audio formats. Third-party plug-ins can add other audio formats and music visualization effect. Sonique can also play to audio streams. Sonique comes bundled with
280-467: A person outside the company creates additional source code, using the less restrictive license. Because the company with the official code is not the copyright holder of the additional code, they may not legally include this new work in their more restrictively licensed version. Companies may require outside developers agree to a contributor license agreement before accepting their work in the official code-base and source code repositories. Multi licensing
315-470: A platform for listening to, organizing and purchasing digital music. This version, however, never reached general availability . Following the collapse of the dot-com bubble , Lycos laid off the entire Sonique team with the exception of McCann and Lyman. Unhappy with the summary termination of their colleagues, McCann and Lyman left shortly thereafter. A smaller team from Lycos corporate headquarters took over their job but never completed it. Sonique features
350-693: A software package after it was made free software, they have chosen to ignore any bugs filed against these packages. The OSS API has remained influential despite the obscurity of the original library. NetBSD's documentation describes it as "the preferred API in FreeBSD and Solaris". FreeBSD contains an independently developed implementation of the OSS API, which includes, among other things, in-kernel resampling, mixing (vchans), equalizer, surround sound, and independent volume control for each application. It also supports bit-perfect mode. It gradually evolved from
385-679: A tendency towards commercial bias. To prevent the community from being provoked or alienated it may therefore seem imperative to balance commercial inclinations against “open” interests. This is by no means an easy task. As Berdal demonstrated through a case study of SugarCRM , this commercial open source software (COSS) business model can trigger substantial friction points, which can eventually lead to pure open source forks (table adapted from Berdal, Table 3, page 75 ): Free Software purists: “Immoral”. 2) wider scope for price discrimination and product differentiation for commercial editions, and 3) stronger incentives for Sugar CE users to migrate to
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#1732797888627420-504: Is a commercial edition, hence to be purchased. The license is only offered as a subscription, named MySQL Enterprise Edition Subscription. The same applies for MySQL Standard Edition (MySQL Standard Edition Subscription) and MySQL Cluster CGE (MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition Subscription). The other editions, such as the MySQL Classic Edition or MySQL Community Edition, are free to use with some restrictions. For instance,
455-433: Is also known as the dual-license strategy of commercial open source. In contrast to traditional open source projects, a single-vendor commercial open source project is controlled by exactly one stakeholder with the purpose of commercially exploiting it . In this context, the open source community is less engaged in the development of core functionality, as they typically are in conventional (pure) open source projects. As
490-434: Is done to proprietary software to segregate a market. By splitting customers into multiple categories such as home users, professional users, and academic users, copyright holders can set different prices for each group. However, among proprietary software companies, it is more common to release a "home edition" and a "professional edition" of a given product, which differ by the software and software features included, not just
525-483: Is used by the copyright holders of some free software packages advertising their willingness to distribute using both a copyleft free software license and a non-free software license. The latter license typically offers users the software as proprietary software or offers third parties the source code without copyleft provisions. Copyright holders are exercising the monopoly they're provided under copyright in this scenario, but also use multi licensing to distinguish
560-535: The /dev/audio interface. Detailed access to individual sound devices is provided via the /dev/oss directory. OSS also has MIDI support in /dev/sequencer , /dev/music (both legacy) and /dev/mini . On Linux, OSS4 is also able to emulate ALSA , its open-source replacement. OSS was originally "VoxWare", a Linux kernel sound driver by Hannu Savolainen. Savolainen made the code available under free software licenses, GPL for Linux and BSD for BSD distributions. Between November 1993 (and Linux 1.00) and 1997, OSS
595-584: The Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1, GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0 or GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.1 before the latter upgraded to GPL-compatible MPL 2.0, making the tri-licensing unnecessary. Other examples are Perl , which is dual-licensed under the GPL or Artistic License , and Ruby , whose license contains explicit GPL dual licensing. Multi-licensing is also used by distributors of non-free software. Sometimes this
630-461: The audioEnlightenment MP3 decoding engine by Tony Million , innovative audio visualizations , and a 20 band graphic equalizer . Sonique had roots in the lesser known Vibe MP3 player that Andrew McCann, Ian Lyman and Paul Peavyhouse created while studying at Montana State University . The trio called themselves Night55, a reference to the speed limit signs used in Montana. In 1997, Night55 sold
665-773: The free software community . These contributions can be the support of a dedicated user community, word of mouth marketing or modifications that are made available as stipulated by a copyleft license. However, a copyright holder's commitment to elude copyleft provisions and advertise proprietary redistributions risks losing confidence and support from free software users. Examples of multi-licensed software include Oracle 's NetBeans IDE , MySQL AB 's database, Asterisk , Oracle Corporation 's Berkeley DB , Modelio , ZeroC 's Ice , Magnolia CMS , JUCE , wolfSSL , and Qt Software 's Qt development toolkit. Description on one specific example to illustrate multi-licensing: Oracle MySQL comes in various editions: MySQL Enterprise Edition
700-612: The "newpcm" replacement written in 1999 and caught up with OSS4 API around 2005. NetBSD supports a compatibility mode for the OSS API, by providing the soundcard.h header file and the libossaudio library, which internally operate using the native Sun-like audio interface. The replacement was first seen in NetBSD 1.3 of 1998. Linux had, as aforementioned, switched to Advanced Linux Sound Architecture since 2003 (kernel 2.6). ALSA provides an optional, in-kernel, OSS emulation mode that appears to programs as if it were OSS. ALSA also has
735-581: The Linux community abandoned the OSS/free implementation included in the kernel and development effort switched to the replacement Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). FreeBSD by this time had switched to a "newpcm" project started in 1999 and was not affected. In July 2007, 4Front Technologies released sources for OSS under CDDL-1.0 for OpenSolaris and GPL-2.0-only for Linux . Drivers for some soundcards remained closed-source and were not included in
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#1732797888627770-593: The MySQL Community Edition is a freely downloadable version, available under the GPL license and is supported by a community of open source developers. The term single-vendor commercial open source was coined by Dirk Riehle in 2010, and has later been further popularized by other scholars, such as Simon R. B. Berdal . According to Riehle: Single-vendor commercial open source firms build their business around an open source software project that they fully control, typically by having developed
805-540: The code-owning firm, as well as strategic partners that have vested interest in the software. As Riehle notes, In single-vendor open source, almost all of the core product development work is carried out by the commercial firm, with occasional contributions from the community. As Berdal notes, the governance of the open source community becomes a key business management process in this context: As such, it needs to be aligned with other business activities. Governance models of dual-licensed OSS editions may therefore display
840-410: The license. Sonique (media player) Sonique is an audio player for Microsoft Windows . Released as freeware, Sonique is capable of handling MP3 , Ogg Vorbis , Windows Media Audio (WMA), and audio CDs . Sonique was in development until 2002. It was one of the most popular desktop audio players, second only to Winamp . The major features of Sonique include support for irregular skins ,
875-429: The number of licenses used, e.g. dual-licensed for software licensed under two different licenses. When software is multi-licensed, recipients can typically choose the terms under which they want to use or distribute the software, but the simple presence of multiple licenses in a software package or library does not necessarily indicate that the recipient can freely choose one or the other. In some cases, especially when
910-602: The release. In January 2008, 4Front Technologies released OSS for FreeBSD (and other BSD systems) under the BSD-2-Clause . OSS4 now exists mostly as a standalone piece of software, not integrated into the kernel source code. The exception is Solaris and OpenSolaris , which use a fork of OSS4 called Boomer. It combines the OSS4 framework (audio and mixer) together with Sun's earlier SADA ( /dev/audio ) API. Although Linux distributions such as Ubuntu made OSS4 available as
945-429: The rights and freedoms different recipients receive. Such licensing allows the holder to offer customizations and early releases, generate other derivative works or grant rights to third parties to redistribute proprietary versions all while offering everyone a free version of the software. Sharing the package as copyleft free software can benefit the copyright holder by receiving contributions from users and hackers of
980-660: The rights to Vibe to SGS Thompson for showcasing DVD features in COMDEX '98. After selling the rights to Vibe, Andrew McCann and Ian Lyman began work on Sonique, a more comprehensive MP3 player. Sonique debuted in January 1998 at the first annual MP3 Summit to enormous excitement, receiving several acquisition offers the same day. Shortly after the MP3 Summit, Lyman and McCann returned to their hometown of Bozeman, Montana and formed Mediascience, Inc. They leased office space in
1015-447: The software and never having shared control with third parties. This is done by owning the full copyright to the code and related intellectual property such as patents and trademarks... Typically, the free open source form is provided under a reciprocal license like the GPL to drive adoption but stall possible competitors. Paid-for versions of the software are then provided under a commercial license like traditional software vendors do. This
1050-429: The software at little or no cost, and profits by selling proprietary licenses to commercial operations looking to incorporate the software into their own business. This model can be compared to shareware . Since in most cases, only the copyright holder can change the licensing terms of a software, multi licensing is mostly used by companies that wholly own the software which they are licensing. Confusion may arise when
1085-434: The software has multiple origins, all the accompanied licenses apply at the same time. The applicability of the different licenses has to be individually checked. The distributor may or may not apply a fee to either option. The two usual motivations for multi-licensing are license compatibility and market segregation based business models. Multi-licensing is commonly done to support free software business models in
Open Sound System - Misplaced Pages Continue
1120-452: The then CEO Mårten Mikos of MySQL said in an interview: The depth of the contributions varies by product and situation. The deeper you go into the core of the database engine, the more difficult it is for somebody to contribute because it takes five years to learn. If you build something on the outskirts of the kernel - some tool or function that you add on top of it - then that is much easier because there's less risk that you will mess up
1155-410: The whole product. But something great can emerge out of many tiny-looking contributions. It's analogous to how, in economic development, microloans can have such a huge impact - each entry is minimal, but when you multiply it by the number of people who are involved, it grows massive. It starts getting a momentum of its own. . Hence, the community of multi-license software as a rule includes employees of
1190-475: Was later renamed to Joesoft Hear. OSS both as API and as software has been criticized by some developers, such as Paul Davis (of JACK Audio Connection Kit ) and Lennart Poettering (of competing PulseAudio ). Multi-licensing Multi-licensing is the practice of distributing software under two or more different sets of terms and conditions. This may mean multiple different software licenses or sets of licenses. Prefixes may be used to indicate
1225-411: Was the sole choice of sound system in FreeBSD and Linux. This was changed when Luigi Rizzo wrote a new "pcm" driver for FreeBSD in 1997, and when Jaroslav Kysela started Advanced Linux Sound Architecture in 1998. In 2002, Savolainen was contracted by the company 4Front Technologies and made the upcoming OSS 4, which includes support for newer sound devices and improvements, proprietary . In response,
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