[dottrap]

OpenAL has multiple implementations, including the popular open source OpenAL Soft. They are not all closed source.

OpenAL does have a recording API so it isn't pure playback only.

But you are right in that the OpenAL scope is fairly limited. It was designed for games, particularly for rapid and frequent playback of simultaneous short sound effects. Because of this, the memory management issues you bring up are not often an issue. You load all the buffers you need at the beginning of the level and you keep reusing them without any more memory allocation/deallocation.

OpenSL ES was adopted by Android in 2.3 (API 9). However, they just recently seemed to invent yet another API, and seem to be leaving OpenSL behind.