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f33e652
(Get the code!)
When I first saw "Bug" #579300 in early September I was puzzled, because it seemed to make no sense at all. Things are clearer now.
(1) People who have been using applications dependent on OSS are no longer welcome on Ubuntu and must go elsewhere. Mr Chen was given the thankless task of making this known. I'm not critical of him - he thinks he is doing the right thing.
(2) Since there is no plausible technical reason for disabling OSS, we must look elsewhere for the explanation. No doubt this lies in the sociology of open-source audio development and/or in the business model for eventual monetization of Ubuntu. I personally am not sufficiently interested to speculate about this.
(3) I would like to think that Debian is the answer, but the very lengthy wait for the release of Squeeze leads me to suspect that there are serious problems (of a different kind) with Debian too.
(4) The way that the killing of OSS has been handled in Ubuntu is ugly, but I see it as merely part of a wider malaise, just one more nail in the coffin of Linux multimedia. Of course, Linux will survive in the long term - on servers.
Mike