Maybe not quite that misleading.
QUOTE: OpenAL, Allegro, GStreamer, libao, SDL, PortAudio, and ClanLib are not part of the Linux sound stack. GStreamer is a program that produces sound (like any other) and the rest of those programs are various efforts to create a cross-platform standard sound library or something like it (GStreamer can be used as something like this too, if you want).
Tell that to the people who, just to get a few basic multimedia apps running on their systems, find that these mysterious names keep cropping up as problems that need to be solved despite the fact they never tried installing them. Part of the problem, after all, is the common "include the kitchen sink" approach to dependencies amongst desktop application developers.
QUOTE: aRTs is considered defunct (it's no longer in development).
. . . and yet, there are still applications in regular use that implicitly depend on it. Part of the reason for its persistent widespread use is the simple fact that KDE 4 is still regarded by quite a few people as a train wreck, so they use KDE 3 with the dogged determination of people who just haven't found anything they like better.
QUOTE: Even PulseAudio, NAS, and ESD (now usually called EsounD) are all cross-platform.
I'm not sure what that statement does to dispute anything I said. (I'm probably going to keep calling it ESD, by the way, because it's easier to type.) The fact they can (to varying degrees) be used in contexts other than Linux-based systems does not mean their development and/or presence in the diagrammed rat's nest is not largely the result of recent Linux development culture.
QUOTE: Do I think PulseAudio is a great project? Let's just say I have reservations. Why have so many distributions (including BSD systems) adopted it as a sound server?
Uh . . . what? I'm looking at my BSD Unix systems, and I don't see PulseAudio installed.
QUOTE: I'm certainly not going to take the issues with PulseAudio and try to call out all Linux software development because of them.
Nor am I. I'm not saying that PulseAudio makes all of Linux software development bad. I'm saying it's symptomatic of much bigger, deeper problems.
QUOTE: Most of the reason that you see a lot more software starting out development on Linux rather than BSD is because Linux is incredibly more successful on the desktop than BSD.
This is irrelevant to my points.
QUOTE: It's just the nature of open source software that a lot of people are free to develop anything they want. That means that you'll get a lot of "duplication of effort" and a lot of different projects.
This was not my point. In fact, I have explicitly stated that I think "competition" of a sort in open source software development is a good thing, and that experimentation leads to innovation.
I can't think of any way to redirect you toward addressing my actual points other than saying "Please read what I have already said."
