Comment 102 for bug 579300

@David:
Even if our opinions are hugely different I really thank you for your answer.
Indeed my primary (but not only) concern was about include-but-blacklist oss emul, which was originally proposed by other users (Christophe Van Reusel, what_if) since 2010-10-22, and which still seems a viable solution for everyone, but lacked any kind of official reply until now.
I don't agree with your conclusion but I can see your points.

This said I hope it's fine if I continue exposing some of my thoughts about this "fix", feel free to skip the remaining part according to your priorities.

Even if for OSS is "Too late, always was, always will be", I hope that at least the way in which this removal was handled can be reconsidered.

I don't see why ubuntu should be hostile (or simply ignore) to applications not shipped with it, and if the devs don't care about Quake, UT, Enemy Territory (just to pick some titles from above) does not mean others feel the same. No one is asking to support those applications, but just not to actively work against them. Is ubuntu going to become a walled-market os where installing anything outside the repo is impossible? Are phone capability planned at least? ;-)

Every piece of software can be a valuable asset and deliver value to both to users and to the platform itself.
Moreover I'm not an audio expert but it comes to mind also that OSS is portable while ALSA is linux only, and so this choice damages various BSD flavours and fragment the opensource sound landscape.

It's a wide accepted principle that API should get deprecated before being removed, this has not happened here.
This is an howto (with the purpose of using OSS on ubuntu) which is just an year old https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenSound where is said that "OSS 4.x is alive and well". If you google "ubuntu oss remove" no official discussion shows up, no warning whatsoever. The fact that this very thread comes up as the 5th result demonstrate how scarce are public discussion about the opportunity of removing OSS support (if someone spoke about this plan in a private masonic lodge doesn't count).

I hope no investor willing to spend money on linux software development read this, because I'm sure that the "a not deprecated API can be dropped everyday without any warning or reason" message is not so reassuring.

Since my focus is not on audio I'll made an act of thrust and try to accept this choice. I hope that time will show me that this makes more sense than it seems. What I'm sure is that things could have been handled better.

If you made this far despite the "escape clause" above, thank you for your time.