[Openal-devel] openal-soft

[Jason Daly]

Lukasz Pawelczyk wrote:
>
> And by all means, please, don't stop developing it. Its really sad to
> see that the library that was made for Linux is in such a bad shape (in
> many cases barely usable) while Creative and Apple happily took it over
> and closed its development.

The old library was really in such bad shape because of its origins and 
the fact that it had been hacked on so long that it was pretty much 
unmaintainable.  Chris did exactly what was needed in rewriting it, and 
his efforts were put to much greater use than trying to "fix" the old 
sample implementation.  So, definitely kudos to Chris.

However, to be fair to Creative, it was their open source version of the 
Windows implementation that provided the basis of OpenAL Soft.  It was 
definitely not a "fork" of the original Linux code base, it was a 
from-scratch implementation that was released to open source, so it's 
not really fair to say they entirely closed up development.  Yes, there 
are proprietary things in the native OpenAL implementation used by 
Creative cards, but much of the code is open source, and it's partly 
because of that that we have OpenAL Soft now.

I just wanted to add my voice to Creative's defense.  I've never worked 
for Creative, so I have no particular loyalty, I just appreciate what 
they've done for OpenAL and cross-platform audio.

-- 

--"J"

"I'm a castaway stranded in a desolate land,
 I can see the footprints in the virtual sand."
	--Neil Peart