PS totally offtopic..
how do you guys come up with names for releases. Some of them are hilarious.

So the crux of your argument is basically that Banshee is not struggling like Songbird because Songbird has more money? Songbird has a team of professional people paid to work full-time on their product. Banshee is developed primarily by volunteers. I hardly see how this is an advantage for Banshee. Usually, the point of paying people is that it frees up time so they have more time to work on something, not less.

But putting that issue aside, you are also mistaken about “UNIX based type” operating systems. The next release of Banshee runs on Windows. It’s actually a fairly straightforward port since Banshee is written in Mono, which is basically an open source implementation of Microsoft’s .Net development framework.

You are right that Windows users significantly outnumber Linux and Mac users, but I don’t particularly buy your argument that this is the best strategy for Songbird. Microsoft has a monopoly on users, but Linux and OS/X have a monopoly on open source software developers. If you want the community to help develop your product then you have to give them a carrot. What kind of Linux or Mac user is going to volunteer time working on a software project that doesn’t offer the same basic features to them as everyone else? Actually, forget the “same basic features.” POTI can’t even be bothered to change the Roadmap so that it accurately reflects the fact that key features are Windows-only. That is misleading and harmful to their end goal.

Besides, there are a number of companies making money writing code for Linux. I can think of Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Intel, and Google, just to name a few. Money is really not the issue for POTI.

The big difference as I see it is that Songbird is taking forever to mature. The project hardly seems as relevant these days as when it started, and I’m not convinced that it will still be around in 5 years as you suggest. I hope I’m wrong because I do still believe in their lofty goals, but the thing is, computers are getting smaller, not faster. Songbird is a 900 pound gorilla, and it’s always playing catch-up on features. On the other hand, Banshee has a lot of momentum. Their product is maturing at an amazingly quick pace, and it seems like they have more practical ambitions than Songbird that better fit into the direction computers are heading.

For example, I could never run Songbird on a netbook, but Banshee runs just fine on slow computers and even has a new alternate user-interface specifically designed for small screens. Most people don’t listen to music on a computer anymore; they listen to it on an mp3 player or a phone. Banshee has the potential to run on a phone. Songbird does not. So while I love the idea behind Songbird, I’m just not convinced that the project is really going anywhere.

With POTI potentially trying to license songbird to companies it would therefore make sense for it to be more windows based because they need to make money. So maybe in 5 years time Banshee might not be being developed any more but POTI will be making money from songbird still? If they actually had to deviate from a UNIX based type of operating system and had to use multiple sources of libraries to implement features I would expect they’d struggle a bit like POTI.