Songbird Throws In the Towel
I've been a longtime user of Songbird, the free media player built on Mozilla technology. The player made some great strides over the past couple of years, packing in features and actually appearing to be a valid alternative to iTunes. That changed today as a blog post revealed that Songbird was open-sourcing their iPod Device Support Add-on, essentially cutting off official support for the most popular media devices in the world.
"Given our limited resources, we’ve decided to support iTunes Import/Export with our own development time, while opening the source to our iPod add-on to the community so other developers can extend and enhance it"...
"This also means QA won’t be testing against iPods anymore so we’ll need your support to help keep us in the loop on what’s working and what’s not."
And that's pretty much that as far as Songbird becoming an iTunes-killer. And I've run out of reasons to keep it installed, which makes me sad. But I don't blame the Songbird guys. Attempting to integrate with or develop against anything Apple produces is an exercise in futility. Maybe the open-source nerds will be able to run with this thing and Songbird will thrive. One thing is for sure, iTunes isn't going anywhere. For now.
