[Openal-devel] openal-soft

[Joseph I. Valenzuela]

On Feb 7, 2008, at 7:49 AM, Jason Daly wrote:

> 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.

I'll also add myself to the chorus of support for Creative in general  
and Garin's role in particular.  Having some knowledge of the  
particulars I can say that they've been consistently supportive from  
the beginning.  The original Linux implementation was definitely not  
a suitable base for future development (any shortcomings almost  
certainly being my fault).  I'm glad to see that there are people now  
able to dedicate time to OpenAL, and put their own individual stamp  
on it.

--
jv