From alsa-devel-owner@alsa.jcu.cz  Sun Feb 28 23:27:59 1999
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Date: Sun, 28 Feb 1999 17:26:03 -0500 (EST)
From: "Christopher T. Lansdown" <lansdoct@screech.cs.alfred.edu>
To: alsa-devel@alsa.jcu.cz
Subject: Re: Trident's contribution, a draft 
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> ...
> the SonicVibes support has the ability to load DLS banks? If not, then
> really the S3 stuff only supports AUDIO playback, and not the best features
> of the soundcard.
	Put it this way: what's the point of winning if you do it by
giving in?  What have we won if our Linux systems depend on proprietary,
non-free drivers?  We've got NT all over again.  Why bother in the first
place? 

> My understanding of ALSA is to provide a robust COMPLETE sound solution for
> linux users, that is "free". The only problem with the GPL is that a LOT of
> current developers/vendors do not agree with releasing their source code
> for ALL to see. Part of the reason behind OOP was to "hide" the details so
> other developers using your code dont see your source..they only know how
> to use it. I am all for GPL, and indeed plan on releasing my own music core
> as GPL (eventually). 
	That's a bad part of OOP.  The good part, the one that emulates
the UNIX idea of strictly defined input and output for recombination of
programs (e.g. for $i in *.txt; echo $i >> output.data; cat $i | grep -v
'FOO' | wc >> output.data; done) is good.  The idea that I can't see what
you're doing is bad.  Information hiding is, morally speaking, bad.  There
are examples where it isn't, such as the location of naval ships to
enemies in times of war, etc., but when life and death doesn't depend on
it, it's very hard to come up with a justification for that doesn't rely
on greed.  Open Source has been proved to be economically viable (RedHat,
Cygnus, etc.).  It hasn't proved to be economically dominative, e.g. like
M$, but who cares about that.  What right do people have to be economic
tyrants?

> But..the one MAJOR bottleneck with linux is trying to
> get hardware and software vendors alike to JOIN linux and build their
> products for linux, whether its drivers, scanners, cameras, etc. If we say
> "sorry ALSA users, we will never support SB Live because its a binary only
> driver and we dont except that" you have pretty much shut off more than 1
> million users and counting from using ALSA. That means your "competitor"
> OSS (I think thats them) would have potential to support them and others,
> and thus have a much larger user base than ALSA. 
	Yes.  Then people have the headache of their binary only drivers
(i.e. a royal pain in the ass recompiling kernels, more frequent crashing
(probably), etc.), they will look for a card that won't give them those
headaches in the future.
 
> looks much better to a lot of potential vendors. And..if those vendors
> start going with say OSS in this case, then the end users will follow suit. 
	Such as Adaptec?  Matrox?  Trident Micro? etc.

> Well, thats fine if that your look. Personally, their soundcard for the
> price and performance is by far the best one out there. 
	This doesn't make any sense.  If there card is so good, why hide
the source?  If it's so easy to make if you know the interface, it can't
be that good.  Btw, a good card hides the interface.  you say to it, "I
want three of those here and Seven of those there".  Nothing revealed, all
of the work is done by the card.  If so much of the work is done by
software, you're being cheated.

> like MX-200, MX-300, Monster Sound, etc that use RAM based sounds, this
> could very well hurt the ALSA project. 
	Are you forgetting that ALSA only runs on Linux?  There's SGI,
SUN, *BSD, etc.  People will generally always have OSS compatability to
work on more than Linux.  ALSA isn't going to replace OSS in the interface
sense for a while, at least.   If you mean in terms of hardware support,
then yes, ALSA may lag on those cards.  For a while.
	Let's apply the RMS test, what's best for the future of free
software.
	1. Binary only drivers in ALSA
	More people will use ALSA, probably.  Creative Labs will make more
cards under NDA.  Most people won't bug them to release specs.  They will
go on doing this, secure in their niche of binary only.
	2. No binary only drivers in ALSA
	People will use binary OSS drivers instead of ALSA drivers.  More
people will be aware of the inferior support of Creative.  Hardware Howtos
shouldn't list creative as they aren't really supported.  Some people will
buy other hardware.  Creative will probably keep making NDA cards, but
they will probably at least notice that they aren't achieving as much
market penetration as they would like.

> I disagree. For what I said above, the short term support you get now may
> go a long way in proving to these vendors that the ALSA spec is the right
> way, and may eventually release source code, etc. 
	Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't.  Creative seems wed to
the idea of NDA.  From what I've heard they are militant about it, not
reactionary about it, the way that companies that have switched were.
This is just speculation, though.  I don't have a crystal ball.

> On the other hand, why is it necessary to release source code to drivers
> for soundcards? Almost all end users of ALSA will never need to worry about
> HOW the driver was written or ever touch it. Mostly software developers of
> music products are the only ones that may have a curiousity to see the
> driver in detail, and at that, they may never need to actually change it.
> Besides, some companies would look at someone "changing" their code and
> re-releasing it as a BETTER or ENHANCED driver as if THEY themselves were
> incapable of doing so. That could look bad on a well established company.
	First, how can you consider releasing something under the GPL and
make comments this stupid?  "What does freedom matter to most people, they
don't have the ability to take advantage of it anyway?"  Come one.  What
did slavery matter to the slaves, they weren't educated enough to really
do much with their lives?  This idiotic argument can be made for just
about every denial of freedom to a person.
	Furthermore, it looks much worse for a company that they are too
embarrased of the way that they designed their cards to let anyone see it,
then that they might not have thought of everything in their drivers.
Would you rather have your car work done by a mechanic who takes good
adice from people who point out mistakes, or from a mechanic who is too
ashamed of his work to let anyone see it?

My $.01 worth.
	-Chris

lansdoct@cs.alfred.edu
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Linux Programs: http://cs.alfred.edu/~lansdoct/linux/
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