AudioScience GPLs Hardware-Abstraction Layer

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."

Comments

Doubtful

[wowbagger]

I don't think you can draw parallels between an audio processing card and a video card:

In an audio processing card, the "magic" is in the DSP firmware loaded onto the card, which a GPL driver will simply treat as a binary blob of data stuffed in by a user space program when the driver module is loaded.

Once that "blob" is loaded, the audio streams are fairly simple, and the "magic" of the DSP is not reveiled by feeding the audio streams in - you feed in 44.1kS/s 16x2 audio, you get an MPEG stream - that operation reveils nothing about how the MPEG algorithm is implemented. Additionally, the MPEG algorithm is well documented and public knowledge (NOT public DOMAIN - public KNOWLEDGE!)

In a video card, the "magic" is in the chip's hardware design - in that respect it is simillar to the audio card.

With one significant exception: the way you "feed" the data into the card reveils MUCH about the implementation of the underlying algorithms, many of which are trade secrets.

So while I applaud AudioScience for this move, and while this move provides a good example to the video card makers, their situation is sufficiently different from AudioScience that, at this time, I doubt this will make much difference to them.

Now, if things progress to the point where Linux is a significant fraction of the video card manufacturer's market....