Free, Proprietary, Free
The project was initially free software, but following the project's success, Savolainen was contracted by the company 4Front Technologies and made his support for newer sound devices and improvements proprietary. In response, eventually the Linux community abandoned the OSS/free implementation included in the kernel and development effort switched to the replacement Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA). Some Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, have chosen to disable OSS support in their kernels and ignore any bugs filed against OSS4 packages (although OSS support may be re-enabled on Ubuntu).
In spite of this, several operating systems, such as FreeBSD, continued to distribute previous versions of OSS, and continue to maintain and improve these versions.
In July 2007, 4Front Technologies released sources for OSS under CDDL for OpenSolaris and GPL for Linux.
In January 2008, 4Front Technologies released OSS for FreeBSD (and other BSD systems) under the BSD License.
Read more about this topic: Open Sound System
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