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Songbird the Open Source iTunes?
An anonymous reader writes "Cnet has an interesting story about a company about to release an open source alternative to iTunes. Apparently, the software can be used with a multitude of music services." From the article: "Apple's iTunes is 'like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com,' Lord said. 'We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures.'"
I love Musikcube, best simple music/CD player for Windows. I wish they would port it to Linux, all the other media players on Linux feel bloated and unintuitive compared to Musikcube. No fancy, uneeded effects. Everything completely in one single window. Built-in search. Built-in CD Ripper. But it stays out of your way. All of this out of the box. I highly suggest anyone interested to try it. http://www.musikcube.com/ It is GPL too (or maybe it was BSD, don't remember, you'll have to check).
Klearlooks theme + the Clearlooks color scheme. Not quite as nice as Clearlooks yet, but it's getting there.
Lipstick is also quite nice.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
That's really not fair to say that the entire company is based on taking the best ideas out of other UIs and then modifying them. Certainly they have done that, but Apple also contributed a lot of wholly original ideas and innovations that hadn't been seen before (I'm not going to recount them all here, it is discussed in other histories of GUI development, especially at Xerox PARC and Apple).
Smalltalk was, in fact, developed at Xerox PARC in the 1970's.
NeXT combines the Smalltalk programming model, the Stepstone Objective-C language, the GNU compiler, the CMU Mach kernel, and the Adobe Postscript language (not much original there, but at least NeXT paid for some of it). Jobs did a great job at putting together NeXT out of existing technologies, but he didn't exactly contribute a lot of technology.
Let me repeat: there is nothing wrong for Apple copying from other people, but Apple should stop complaining (and sueing) when people copy from them.
True, but it's a product announcement from Rob Lord, one of the two guys who started IUMA way back near the beginning of the web age. A product announcement from somebody with a history of creating products that were ahead of their time is worth paying attention to. He was running a hugely successful online music site 5 years before most of the world had even considered the idea.
As a former competitor of Rob's, I'd take him seriously; he knows what he's doing, at least with regards to technology. (He didn't know how IUMA was going to make money either; he probably should have thought more about that.) Of course there's no guarantee that Songbird will be a success, but based on Rob's track record, I'd say it'll be worth seeing what he comes up with.
Others have rightly pointed out that Apple's legal department will run this into the ground, but they've missed the most important reason why:
When you purchase a song from the iTunes Music Store, the AAC file is downloaded without FairPlay DRM encryption. The iTunes software adds the FairPlay DRM while downloading, encrypting the file with your iTMS account ID. An open-source client wouldn't do this (or at least wouldn't have to, if it could). Apple would be in a heap of trouble with the record labels if they allowed this software to exist.
The only way to make it work is to move the encryption process from the client to the server, which would significantly increase Apple's costs (in addition to the huge CPU requirements of encrypting every song they sell, they probably wouldn't be able to use Akami's distribution network anymore).
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