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Songbird Drops Linux Support

Posted by Soulskill on from the business-realities dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a shocking announcement, as Songbird has its roots in open source. Songbird will, however, continue to be available for Windows and Mac." In their blog post on the subject, the developers said, "We remain loyal to Linux and the ideology it represents, so we will maintain a version of the software for use by our Songbird engineers who develop on the Linux platform. We’ll make that version available to the community. We will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. That said, those builds will not be tested and may not pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team."

10 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Help in TFA? by Gothmolly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not once in TFA or the summary does it say what Songbird does.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    1. Re:Help in TFA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      and in other news, my mate Dave said the 12 line shell script he uses for grabbing entries from /var/log/messages won't be get ported to Windows

    2. Re:Help in TFA? by spyrochaete · · Score: 5, Informative

      Songbird is a music player and library organizer similar to iTunes or Winamp. It's based on the Mozilla Firefox Gecko framework. It inexplicably uses about 130MB of RAM while idle.

    3. Re:Help in TFA? by Winckle · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well they wanted to have feature parity with iTunes.

    4. Re:Help in TFA? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      When I had two machines with two OSes it was nice to have Songbird look the same irregardless. It could play most of my music irregardless of the file type. Now I'm a fan of OSS, but irregardless I couldn't use Songbird for too long because it resembled iTunes too much - almost like it was trying to be a substitute irregardless of being a music player. However it did have on-the-fly playlists so irregardless of its flaws it did have its good points.

      Irregardless I kept using it because it was nice. But then I started using other file types and, irregardless of my feelings for Songbird, I had to part with it. Irregardless of what a "music player" is, I need mine to have CD ripping.
      Don't get me wrong: I don't give it ill regards, less I suggest to people it's a bad product, but if it doesn't have enough of the right features I can't use it - irregardless of its age.

  2. Community involvement by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's a housing development not far from where I live that has draconian rules about "community involvement". In order to own property there, it is necessary to spend time on the board or doing board-approved activities. They have immaculate lawns.

    I own my own property here, and I have no connection to any third party except the bank and the government. My lawn is a mess, but I welcome anyone who would like to mow it.

    Isn't the spirit of Free Software about everyone pitching in and helping each other freely? Or did I misunderstand freedom to mean freedom for others to do work for me for free?

    I see nothing in Songbird's announcement that is negative in any way.

  3. Open Source != Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Linux is open source. Open source is not Linux.

    Its not really that shocking.

  4. solongbird by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not long before the Windows and Mac development stops, too. This software failed to gain traction.

  5. Re:Why the shock? 0% of the market is not worth it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Especially with so many of the old school unix types like me having migrated to OS-X

    I call Shenanigans! A real old school Unix user would have:
    a) Capitalized the 'U' merely out of respect
    b) Waxed nostalgically about Unix (at least 3 full paragraphs)
    c) Included "rm -SCO" or "sudo fuck SCO" in their post

    As for me, an old school Unix user, I switched to Mac because it was the best computer I could steal. The old lady I took it from still thinks her toaster is the slowest screen saver ever.

  6. From my experience it's not a great loss by overnight_failure · · Score: 5, Informative

    N.B. I am a Windows 7 user and it did say when I installed that Windows 7 was not supported.

    I dropped iTunes out of my home setup a while back and thought I've give Songbird a go. I've been running it for about 4 months now and I have to say, in IMO, it is one aweful piece of software which I rarely use now. Barring the crashes (ack. NB above) its usability is pretty poor.

    I hope others have hade better experiences with it.