Oh Noes! You mean I have choices of how to handle audio on my linux boxes?! Surely we should just pick a monopolistic vendor and let them dictate it for us for simplicity's sake. They could approve the drivers so we'd know they're good. We could call it driver signing and pay them lots of money for the privilege.
Okay, does anyone even use OSS anymore? I thought it hasn't been included in kernels for a while. (save for the OSS->ALSA compatibility layer)
As for there being a large variety of user-space libraries: are we supposed to believe this to be a bad thing? In the past, we've needed sound servers, which have become pretty much entirely unnecessary as ALSA can do mixing, etc. (except for JACK, but even Windows has a completely different set of kernel audio drivers for professional sound recording)
These choices and the eventual elimination of some of them are a good thing: it means the better technology (as judged by developers & users) wins, not some decree. I don't know what other unix-derived OSes use, (OSS?) but on Linux-only libraries, I suspect OSS support will eventually disappear.
Now, of course Adobe would complain about this, as their plugin has to run on all possibly imaginable systems out of the box; there's no open-source component that interfaces with the hardware drivers so that the community could fix obscure problems themselves.
