Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices (i.e. POSIX read, write, ioctl, etc.). The term also refers sometimes to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; in that sense it can be thought of as a device driver or collection of device drivers for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow one to write a sound-based application program that works with any sound controller hardware, even though the hardware interface varies greatly from one type to another.