Open Sound System

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The Open Sound System (OSS) is a portable sound interface available in 11 different Unix systems. It was created in 1992 by Hannu Savolainen of Finland.

Following the project's success, Savolainen started the company 4Front Technologies and made his improvements proprietary, which may have contributed indirectly to the creation of ALSA. The proprietary package, developed by 4Front, is available at http://www.opensound.com/. However, free systems like GNU/Linux and *BSD include their own free GPL/BSD implementations.

[edit] OSS in relation to ALSA

In the case of the Linux kernel, OSS was the only supported sound system used up to the 2.4.x series. Starting with version 2.5, ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture was introduced, and the OSS interface became deprecated by Linux' authors. ALSA contains an optional OSS emulation mode that transparently appears to programs as if it was OSS.

ALSA is the recommended interface for software that is intended to work on Linux only. However, software that strives to be portable across other Unices (including *BSD) typically uses OSS instead (or supports both).