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X11AMP changes name to XMMS and gets sponsored
Crocodile writes "X11AMP chaned name to XMMS (X MultiMedia System)
and is now sponsored by 4Front Technologies
Read more about it in the
press release. You can download xmms .9 final as well.
"
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Hi,
.plan).
:) (disclaimer: we're not making any money of LJ sales!)
Here's the one and only message you'll get from 4Front and you can decide for yourself.
4Front is basically just two people: Hannu Savolainen and Dev Mazumdar (myself). Hannu is the
author of OSS/Free which is 100% GPL'ed. We gave p lucerative "DAY JOBS", me at IBM and Hannu at an engineering company in Finland. Today, we are making less that what we can be making if we
were working at day jobs and we are decent Linux programmers. We really like what we do - developing OSS drivers for Linux/UNIX.
Crocodile, Fatal and Peter are good friends of ours and they are "poor" guys and don't even make
any signficant money. X11amp was stagnating because these guys were busy doing other things so I offered them some money to basically get them motivated to work full time on XMMS. Nobody who downloaded X11amp has offered a plug nickel to these guys!. We stepped up to the plate, and offered them a small token from our meager earnings. We each make less than $60,000 a year - we're not Redhat or VA with millions!. We work damn hard at supporting our customers and who else gives you a product for $20-$30 with free tech support for 2 years and free upgrades for 3 years?. Not Redhat, not Microsoft, not IBM,not Corel and not Caldera, not SuSE, Not Corel. Which two-man company have you seen that can support so many different soundcards, so many different OSs and keep up with the pace of Linux kernel releases?
If you care to see what our customers are saying, visit http://www.opensound.com/guest.html
I can also share with you what our customers are raving about our tech support (email me!)
So now that these guys have joined 4Front, are you going to deny them the right to earn a living????
BTW, Crocodile makes some money selling OSS/Linux licenses in Sweden and all the proceeds go to him, Peter and Fatal.
The number of contributed plugins aren't coming in at the rate at which some of the Winamp or other Windows plugins are coming (says that OpenSource isn't up to keeping pace with Windows in the media dept).
So basically, yes, we are interested in getting XMMS working on all the versions of UNIX we support in OSS (besides Linux) but guys, OSS/Free is GPL, XMMS is GPL.
WHAT PART OF GPL DO YOU NOT GET?.
Go ahead and modify OSS/Free and XMMS all you want. Infact, we'd be too happy if you contributed any improvements to either one.
As for ALSA, we don't know if we can support it since ALSA's asound.h is GPL'ed which means that there can be no "closed sourced" application development. If Linus makes ALSA the standard driver in the kernel, so be it. We'll probably shutdown OSS for Linux and concentrate on other UNIX systems. In anycase, DO NOT CONFUSE OSS/Free and OSS/Linux. The commercial OSS drivers are waaay ahead of OSS/Free - Virtual Mixer, shadow devices for full duplex, more number of sound cards and a working ESS Solo-1/Maestro driver - we used the same docs available to everybody else - neither the ALSA nor OSS/Free have it working - we do!
We have no beef with ALSA guys, we wish them well and perhaps there's enough room in Linux for both APIs - we have never said anything derogatory to ALSA - while they continue to spread FUD about OSS - like no new technologies no new development. All I can say is you ain't seen what we've done with OSS for some of our customers who pay for our services to customise OSS. Here's a small sampling of our successes:
- OSS is used at a defence contractor building helicopter simulations using OSS with Terratec EWS64 soundcards with full DREAM 9407 working with 4 channel surround sound - but that driver isn't for sale to the general public!.
- OSS is used by Marquette Medical systems to build patient monitoring systems using VxWorks.
- OSS is used by Lockheed martin to build voice recognition systems for the next generation of battle tanks.
- OSS is used by Broardcast.com, ZDTV, and by the US Govt and yes, including Microsoft!!!!
- 4Front has donated OSS to the East Palo Alto Inner City Development Center for educating inner city youths.
- 4Front has donated free OSS licenses to all the major Linux audio developers - Alan Cox, Dave Phillips (Linux audio apps website), Sam Lantiga (SDL/Loki) Even some of the ALSA developers like P.J Leonard, all the KDE developers, all the FreeBSD developers. Luminaries like David Korn. Plus we're helping iD Software with Quake3 (see Zoid's
So the question is are we a Microsoft? Anybody can write a driver - we stepped in and tried to do the right thing, and now that we're making a few bucks (less than what Linus makes, and out of that we're giving some to the XMMS guys) and you're accusing us of Microsoft like tactics?.
I just want to say that if you like OSS/Linux, buy it and you'll be a happy customer, if you absolutely hate our guts, use ALSA or OSS/Free or why not write a driver under Joe's Sound System?. Also please explain why are OSS licenses being hotly pirated on irc if it totally sucked? - obviously we're doing something right!
4Front has been one of the first software companies developing for Linux and gpl'ing our products (we did give away SoftOSS, Yamaha OPL3-SAx and fixed up certain other drivers in OSS/Freee). Why are people so dead against us and not others like Perl, Cygnus, Scriptics, Sendmail - these apps are essential services for Linux and still they are "closed source products".????.
If you think 4Front is a monopoly, so is Sendmail, so is Scriptics, so is every stinking successful Linux company - Redhat/SuSE/VA/Caldera/PHT. You have a choice - OSS/Linux or OSS/Free or ALSA or Roll-your-own sound driver (like Corel Netwinder, EMPeg, etc)!.
BTW, PLEASE BUY the JULY ISSUE OF Linux Journal, you'll read about our philosophy in an interview by Dave Phillips. A shameless plug at last
Best regards
Dev Mazumdar
Anyone else other than me see this as a microsoft-like tactic to keep 4Front's relavence in the marketplace for their OpenSound system? With some of the talk kicking around about the base sound support in Linux 2.3 changing over to ALSA (a far superior -- and free -- system IMHO), maybe they just want to try to keep control of things.
Maybe someone should submit patches to XMMS giving it native ALSA support...
It's been GPL'd for ages - has really nice skin support (including shaped skins), is fast, doesn't crash, and is just generally cool - and it isn't a copy of a Windows program :).
GQmpeg/GQview