Comment 268 for bug 371897

To keep the flames burning:

1. It's not license issues that keep OSS4 out of the kernel.
If you filter out personal bickering between those two teams
(about 95% of that discussion - in a way, same as here),
there are some technological issues too, i.e.
using float processing in kernel space.

2. My opinion here is rather biased, as I don't use wine
for anything resource heavy and though having a crappy soundcard
(just onboard AC'97), pulseaudio works just fine for me,
at least for playback (IIRC, never tried capture).

3. For me, comment 157 sums up this problem best
- there's a need to redesign whole Wine audio infrastructure,
not simply tweak old (or add new) drivers. winepulse could
be an acceptable temporary solution, the problem is that
often there's nothing longer living than a temporary hack.
If somebody found time for that redesign, winepulse could
be useful till things really get fixed, otherwise it would
eventually end up as an unmaintained hack. After all, pulseaudio
already went a few times through changes, that broke its
plugins in other libs/programs.