Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

AudioScience GPLs Hardware-Abstraction Layer

Posted by timothy on from the making-noises dept.

Rob Dye writes "According to an article at RadioWorld Online, AudioScience has GPL'ed their hardware abstration layer that allows access to the DSP power provided on their audio interfaces. Stating that 'Linux is becoming more important to the broadcast and professional audio industry,' they also released full documentation for this code and intend to release ALSA drivers for their boards. This is terrific news for professional sound under Linux, especially considering the reluctance of video card manufacturers to open their HAL's."

5 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. About time by thecoder42 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hopefully the videocard makers will follow suit and release their drivers open source to the world.

  2. the light is shining by castlec · · Score: 2, Interesting

    professional rendering has been on linux for a while, mostly under proprietary apps, but they recognized the need to support more than just the proprietary OSs. It's good to see professional audio begin to make its slice available to the free world. this could be the beginning of the end of the large recording studios.

    --
    When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
  3. Quick question by GreatOgre · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Is it possible for the video card manufacturers to build their boards such that the information about the chipsets, algorithms, etc. are not easily revealed? If so, why don't they do so?

    1. Re:Quick question by Hard_Code · · Score: 2, Interesting

      But most (all?) graphics programmers are programming to a high level interface like opengl or directx *anyway* (and in turn these can only use whatever the driver for the card exposes, right?), so why even bother exposing more than is necessary? Anything you can't hide, open source. I'm buying hardware, not software. If "hidden surface removal" must live in the driver, and is complicated, open source the damn thing and compete on hardware merits. The programmability is even being abstracted through mid-level shader languages, so I see the need for exposing the guts of the card decreasing. In fact, I think reprogrammability of graphics cards [and drivers] would be a great thing...you could load a module that is "optimized" for a given application instead of having a monolithic driver from a vendor which tries to balance everything accross the board.

      Is there really any innovation in the closed source drivers?

      --

      It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
    2. Re:Quick question by wowbagger · · Score: 2, Interesting
      If "hidden surface removal" must live in the driver, and is complicated, open source the damn thing and compete on hardware merits.


      But that is exactly what the hardware venders DON'T want to do, and that is why they don't open their drivers.
      --
      www.eFax.com are spammers