Editing Open Sound System (section)

== History ==
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)<ref>{{Cite web |title=Linux 0.99 patchlevel 14 - Diff - 75bb5836a8a8c0ee44ffd60a51f357b9568f1381^! - pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nico/archive - Git at Google |url=https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/nico/archive/+/75bb5836a8a8c0ee44ffd60a51f357b9568f1381%5E!/ |access-date=2024-03-22 |website=kernel.googlesource.com}}</ref> and 1997, OSS 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.<ref name=fbsd>{{cite web |title=Sound - FreeBSD Wiki |url=https://wiki.freebsd.org/Sound |website=wiki.freebsd.org}}</ref>

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 software|proprietary]]. In response, 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.<ref name=fbsd/>

In July 2007, 4Front Technologies released sources for OSS under [[Common Development and Distribution License|CDDL-1.0]] for [[OpenSolaris]] and [[GNU General Public License|GPL-2.0-only]] for [[Linux]]. Drivers for some soundcards remained closed-source and were not included in the release.<ref name="OSS-liberated-2007" /> In January 2008, 4Front Technologies released OSS for [[FreeBSD]] (and other [[BSD]] systems) under the [[BSD Licenses|BSD-2-Clause]].<ref name="OSS-BSD-2008">{{citation |url=http://www.opensound.com/press/2008/oss-bsd.txt |title=4Front Technologies releases OSS for FreeBSD under the BSD license |publisher=opensound.com |access-date=2012-01-08}}</ref>