PMView: The ultimate in image viewing
                      Major update coming soon!
              Watch http://www.pmview.com/ for details
*********************************************************************
 
Source: Julien Pierre (madbrain@thetaband.com)
Moderator: Trevor Smith (trevor@haligonian.com)
-------------------------------------------------------

This past week, two well-known audio hardware vendors, Creative Labs
and Aureal, made announcements that they will release the source code
to some of their device drivers. Several in the OS/2 community
suggested that these events would finally allow independent OS/2
driver developers to create audio device drivers for the hardware
from these two vendors.

As many of you know, Theta Band Software (http://www.thetaband.com/)
has been actively developing support for OS/2 multimedia. We recently
released the MM PACK, a collection of OS/2 software which includes an
audio device driver.

Theta Band Software would like to announce that we are investigating
the development of OS/2 device drivers based on the source code
provided by Creative Labs and Aureal. Several issues need to be
clarified before we can commit to development of these drivers, not
the least of which is the license and other legal restrictions under
which the source code is released. There may also be technical
reasons. We will make another announcement when we have enough
information.

In the meantime, there are two issues that need to be stressed.

First, Theta Band Software will not "port" the drivers to OS/2. If we
do look at the source code from CL and/or Aureal, it will only be to
determine how the hardware works. Any drivers we release for CL or
Aureal hardware will be written entirely from scratch, and therefore
we will retain all the copyrights to the code.

Second, Theta Band Software strongly feels that competing against
other OS/2 vendors is a losing proposition. The OS/2 marketplace is
too small for vendors to compete with similar applications. If we
learn that another individual is developing OS/2 drivers based on the
source code from Creative Labs or Aureal, we will cease development
of our drivers. There is no point in having two competing OS/2 device
drivers for a sound card. If you think that you can write a better
audio device driver, then by all means let us know and we won't waste
our time.

Theta Band Software has made this announcement to inform the OS/2
community of our intentions, and we hope that this announcement is
greeted with enthusiam and hopeful expectations. However, at this
time we have nothing more to say on this topic, so please don't email
us asking for more information.
 
-------------------------------------------------------
 To subscribe, unsubscribe, or for more information on
 WarpCast, visit: http://www.warpcast.com/ 
-------------------------------------------------------