It’s indeed a great loss, but I can understand (as a developer myself) the problems with unfocused work. As a mac/linux user, I am half sad, but maybe, with the linux version available for others to mess around, who knows, someone can pick up where the team left and continue the good work in another realms.

I could never get Songbird working properly in Ubuntu, but hoped it would someday be developed enough to work correctly. I don’t see the point in developing a competitor to iTunes on the Mac with those resources instead.

I hope there are a lot of bugs fixed in the new version and not just new features added. I think Songbird is a great piece of Software. But some main functions still have some nerving bugs.
Keep up the good work.

I’m gonna throw it out there, iTunes is better than Songbird. The only interest I had in Songbird was the fact that I could run it on linux, allowing me to ditch windows, but now I can’t, so goodbye Songbird.

Wow. As someone who uses Songbird on Windows, Mac, and Linux, you should know that I choose Songbird because it’s cross-platform. You will lose Windows and Mac users because of this, as well as momentum from the F/OSS community.

I don’t think anyone’s going to be happy about this, even Mac or Windows users.

It’d be great if at some point we could hear the specifics about why Linux support is being dropped.

Well, bye everyone

Suport for Mac and Windows, but not Linux. Why keep support to Mac? Why keep yours focus only windows. It’s sound me preconceituous.

Wow. Just wow.

You’re dropping the only users that don’t already have access to alternatives that are as good or better than SB?

I’m a bit disappointed. I was literally going to give songbird a try today but then saw tweets and dents about no more Open/Free OS releases with a link to this post. That really sucks … I hope you guys end up being able to come back to the Free world in the future.

It’s about time!

I’m a Linux user, it’s true. I dual boot with Windows 7, but I tend to prefer my Ubuntu system. While I did once use Songbird religiously on both platforms, I eventually grew tired of the *perceived* lack of dedication to the GNU/Linux platform. I say *perceived” because I realize I have no right to judge the level of commitment on the part of the dev team. But that is the impression I got: no CD rip and no universal hot keys were at the top of my list of reasons. So I moved on. I no longer use Songbird on my Linux box. And frankly, I’m glad I did. I got a chance to experience a bunch of great Linux-only players. I believe the rest of you Linux users will be doing yourselves a favor by expanding your horizons, as well. (Incidentally, I ended up settling on Exaile.)

Just like I moved on, the Songbird team moved on. I applaud that. Any effort they can spend creating a viable iTunes alternative is effort well spent in my book. I still use Songbird as my player of choice on Windows, and if dropping Linux will help POTI make a better player for my Windows box, I approve. I’m convinced that the world will be well-served if we can convince even a few people to switch away from iTunes, but that won’t happen unless there’s an alternative the iJunkies are comfortable with. Songbird is the best alternative out there at this point, and I’ll support any move they make to improved themselves.

So good job, team. You’ve earned at least one fan.

Goodbye!

Well there goes Songbird’s unique selling point, for me at least. What a shame.

Wait, is this an April Fool’s thing?

Good riddance.

While I am quite upset that Songbird for Linux is no longer officially supported, it’s not an end. On the contrary, it’s a chance for a beginning. Linux users with the right knowhow can fork Songbird and make a Linux-specific media player to their specification without being hindered by the goals of the Songbird company.

I will continue to use Songbird until bitrot takes it and then I’ll go back to Banshee.

Aww, too bad. I was looking forward to more stable versions on linux. I can see how there was not enough manpower behind it, but, ultimately, it was the wrong decision

Well, that’s too bad. Although if it runs properly in Wine, it may not be a total loss.

Just finished uninstalling songbird. Spent the last couple of years telling all my linux buddies that songbird was the shit and the best media player available for linux. Also promoted it through my blog very often.

Congrats. One less fan.

too bad !

Another Mac/Win/Ubuntu user here who won’t be using Songbird on any of my machines in the future.

This is the biggest “wow” moment I can remember since I heard SCO was talking about IP being in Linux. Being non-portable is just a bullshit excuse about having really crappy code, especially these days when so much, media wise, is cross platform. Incredibly bad move. Lost another fan who used you on Windows as well, but will never touch it again.

It’s alright, songbird was never the best music player anyway.

This is a bit silly. The media player market for Windows is one of the most flooded ones for the platform. There’s iTunes, Foobar2000, Winamp, Windows Media Player, etc. As great as Songbird for Linux is, the alternatives for Windows are much better feature-wise. As for Mac OS X, part of owning a Mac is to use the native software. I don’t know a single person who uses anything other than iTunes on their Mac. The Linux market is improving, but there are so many players that either have broken features or are just plain hard to use that Songbird has a chance to thrive on the platform moreso than any other. It’s a shame the OS that is most supportive of open source is the one that’s being snubbed.

I mean, hell, I don’t want to use it on Windows if I can’t use it on all my machines.

This is a sad announcement. I’ve followed the development of Songbird since pretty early on, my only requirement being Linux support. I am an exclusive linux user and there are plenty of alternatives, all better than an attempt with Wine. I’ve been subscribed to this blog in Google Reader for over a year and waited with anticipation for updates. I’ll be unsubscribing momentarily and I can’t say I’ll be sad to miss any updates now that they don’t involve Linux. Thank you to the developers, I appreciate your time and I’m sorry to have lost you.

that’s an incredibly sad and unfortunate and short-sighted decision

I trusted Songbird project, but now it disappointed me. I translated it into my languace, but if I can’t use it anymore, why I should continue contributing to it? I recommanded it to many linux and windows users, but if I can’t test it anymore, I can’t recommend it anymore. You will see this was the worst decision Songbird project is ever made. This is the moment when I say goodbye Songbird.

I can’t say this is surprising, but I can say that dropping support for Mac would have been a much better decision, since there’s no reason not to use iTunes on there anyway.
Bye.

This was released on April 2 so this is not an April F joke. Now that Linux support has been dropped, I just deleted your feed from my feed reader. Exaile is just as good. It has iPod support. I think Rhythmbox does too.

Bye-bye, for ever

What a title …

pffff … what a title ! ! !

You really think it’s appropriated …
“Songbird Singing A New Tune” for “After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird.”

Comm
Comm
Comm

You have lost respect from me and I don’t think Windows or Mac users might use a player as bloated as Songbird for iPod sync when other alternatives exist.

A sad day indeed. I’ve been following Songbird since the really early versions and just recently started using it as my music player on Ubuntu because it did the sync I needed it to do with my Android phone among other things. I’ve recommended it to friends and promoted it within the company I work for and now here they drop Linux support for full screen video? It’s disappointing. I’m sure there are good reasons but it’s always sad to see a project leave the roots that gave it prominence.

Uninstaling…

Who will recommend new users to use Songbird now?

I’m using Songbird about 2 years only on my Linux (Ubuntu) machine. (Because I have only this OS installed). I think, that each program should do only one thing (in this case audioplyaback), but impeccably. There are a lot of software for playing video. As for me it is absolutely useless feature for AUDIO player. Songbird was IMHO the best player for Linux I was using, despite the fact that there were some bugs and other missing features.
But now it is over. I would still using Songbird, but until I find an adequate alternative for Linux.
I will stay reading your blog and hope that you change this strange decision

Extremely disappointing, you had one of the strongest media players on Linux, and yet one of the weakest on the others OS’s why lose your advantage?

I use OS X, Ubuntu, and Windows 7, all with Songbird, and I would rather you stopped development on the Windows and OS X platforms than drop Linux.

never heard of it.

Avoiding certain features was still ok. Now no SB for linux….That’s just outrageous. I am sad…Bad weekend for me. I don’t remember a single day i haven’t checked checked songbird timeline to see when its getting released. Just for my Linux. I understand your concerns about small team and all. But developing SB for platforms which already have plenty of software isn’t some waste of resources ? I know i am biased…But Linux platform is coming strong..Look at new Ubuntu …Its as promising as any OS. Open source OS are because of softwares on it. Firefox, OpenOffice are just few names.

If i was in your place, with money to spent on team from my pocket…definitely i would have selected spending it where money is coming from…Partners…Device makers…They don’t have special love for Linux. I can understand. Making it (Linux version) “completely” open may help Linux community. I wish i was Mozilla hacker …Would have definitely picked up this one for my weekend job. Hope someone from large mozilla community will pick this up.

It would be very helpful to know under which license you open this up for community. Sad day.

Just a word, ridiculous!

Without Rip-to-mp3 and Burn support, I cannot get excited about any new release of Songbird.

Too bad about Linux support, but it’s the Linux community’s own fault for failing to make an OS that is useful to the common user – after even so many years. Epic fail for Linux. Pity.

@GeekShadow I saw frenchbird blog. Seems you all are very enthusiastic about SB+Linux. Please let me know if i can help if you plan to start opensource build of SB on linux. I am not a mozilla hacker, i am java programmer. But can do good QA on weekends. Trying to learn how to hack Mozilla

Woot? You guys are serious?

If you are, then I wish you all the worst and I am evicting SongCrap both from my Mac and from Linux box.

You could instead work for Microsoft or do drugs… but this is too much. FLOSS project to drop Linux? Where is your mailing list? I will troll you to oblivion!

Rhytmbox FTW!!!

*ducks in fear*

these reactions make me sad. These people are developing a nice product, giving it away, with source code and all. While they themseves are discontinueing linux support, they still give others the chance to add the missing code to support linux.

No chance competing with itunes. Maybe someone else will develop Songbird now..

Not really surprised. You really disappointed with your last major release, leaving the Linux version very crippled compared to the Windows version.

Extremely disappointing.

I think this will sadly hurt you more than you would expect.
Your reaction is very similar to what Zenbe did to those of us who had been using and testing their product for a while; but because we were using their product for free they just gave us the boot.

Harmony FOSS guys..!! Frenchbird.org is proposing some opensource development. Have a look at it. They have quite a bit of initial document in place. Just say we do. Or Join in. Trust community power. I am sure POTI people will help. They can share some resources like they said buildbot. Or probably Fund few bucks Of course, All these needs developers. And some full timers too. Lets see how things come up. All the best Frenchbird.org people. Its you who can Help.

http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AcU_F4NVncBXZGc0MmNkY3FfNjY0cDRrcW1mcw&amp%3Bhl=en&amp%3Bpli=1&pli=1

Well, goodbye songbird. Cause I won’t use it anymore…

All the best! And who knows, maybe Songbird will meet Linux again in the feature..

too bad, while linux is a growing platform..

Sad. On windows & mac there are much better players than Songbird. Linux is still in need of a good player.

That’s really sad. I swapped over to Ubuntu two years ago, and Songbird was the first application I installed by myself without the package manager. It was so great looking that I stepped out my my comfort zone because I wanted it that much. (For someone who used Linux for, like, a week, installing a program was hard-looking. XD And I messed it up at first too.) I wouldn’t even mind if the Linux version lagged behind the others. I just love the program. Guess I’ll just keep using it until someone new picks it up or it’s too outdated to work anymore. Plus, Rhythmbox still like us…

Thanks for making a really awesome product. I hope the Mac and Windows versions work out. Honestly though, I know that I’ve suggested this to people across all platforms. It seems like abandoning the Linux version might hurt you with every OS, because your Linux users are probably less likely to suggested it to others.

Sad to hear that you don’t have resources. The reason i used singbird on both my linux and windows, (and talking about this app to friends) was the crosscompability, I would rather have seen you concentrating on linux/mac version. Now i just don’t know..

Whoever made this decision.. I wonder WHY is she/he still working for Mozilla…

“Honestly though, I know that I’ve suggested this to people across all platforms. It seems like abandoning the Linux version might hurt you with every OS, because your Linux users are probably less likely to suggested it to others.”

Yes, this certainly apply

i have to be honest i don’t use songbird other than every so often to see what the technology is achieving. Sadly it doesn’t surprise me from people from mozilla, most of their products have linux as an after thought and i think that it has become part of the culture.

Still hopefully the outpouring may convince you to come up with an alternative, such as offering all linux support to be conducted by the community but with tight communication with the core developers. If you had done this you would have lost nothing and really avoided so much bad press.

Deeply disappointed at this, Songbird was my favorite media player, now I have to go find something new. I believe you will come to regret dropping Linux support.

If you wanna help creating a community build, join us at http://talksongbird.com

Epic fail for you guys. First you get all you need from open source and then you turn your back to the open source community.
I think you lost the train to the future

Songbird shifting the focus away from Linux does not mean dropping the Linux. There IS and WILL be Linux build of Songbird in the future.

Songbird has iJunk rival on Win & OSX does not mean it can not be a good open source jukebox on these platform.

Keep on going. I will still recommend Songbird to my friends who are reluctant to switching to Linux.

One of the Songbird Simplified Chinese translator

And so begins the ignominious path to irrelevancy.

R.I.P.

Songbird lie, Songbird leave Linux because of money out with Linux.
If you’re truly free software defenders then, songbird only would programming for Linux and no for Mac and Windows.
Songbird betrayer.

I use Songbird on Ubuntu and Windows because it has the best Shoutcast plugin I know of. It’s not great a really great program because it is far from being as responsive as it could be. I always hoped you get your act together and make this thing really fast.

Now you drop one of your greatest features (cross-platform compatibility) just to make Songbird even more bloated by adding video playback to a MUSIC player? Maybe you missed something but all three major OSes already come with video players that use less system resources and feel more responsive when playing video than Songbird does when playing audio.

I’ll continue to use Songbird but only until I find something else that has comparable Shoutcast support.

Idiots! Dropping Linux support. You’re clueless! Screw Windows.

Well, now you’ve just become another also-ran Windows media player. Forget all the recommendations I was giving out. I’ll just switch back to what we were all using before.

Just lost all of my usage, along with all of my co-workers.

Well seeing as ubuntu now has a music store im thinking that they may be worried about the share of 7 digital revenue going away in linux anyway.

I’ll stop of recommend Soungbird… 5-6 machines less… On Windows)

This is such a shame because Songbird showed such real promise. We all wanted it to be the Firefox of the media players but it appears as if you got distracted on the path to greatness. Windows has Winamp, MacOS has iTunes. Linux has loads of players, all of which are lacking. Alienating one of the most passionate groups of people on the Internet and turning your back on one of the most important platforms of the future seems to doom the project to ‘just another insignificant media player’ status…

I haven’t used Songbird since they ditched Ipod support, but I left it on my machine because I’m a dreamer. Well, the dream is dead, and I’m off to uninstall it now.

I have to agree with others who have commented on the steady push toward feature bloat at the expense of core function. All I want is a player that will play my music and sync it to my media player. I’m not even asking for sharks with laser beams on their heads.

May the fork be with us.

Well. That is really sad. I had seen Songbird as THE (for me only, because I am not that happy with the alternatives around (amarok, rythmbox, xmms)) player for linux.
I also do not see the point. On Mac and windows, there IS iTunes, which could be used, windows users even have the best player in the world, Winamp, but in the Linux world, there are not so much alternatives.
I think, I will continue using Songbird for a while, and see how the nightlies are going, but on long term, I will have to switch I guess. And that also means, that I have to stop the support for Tagger.

Maybe I will try how Winamp is working on wine, we’ll see.

You wrecked my day, Songbird team.

Dropping Linux support (which is widely demanded) for video support (which nobody cares about.)

right…

Now How can I migrate all my playlists to rithmbox???

NOOOO!!!
I love songbird in my linux box Others sucks!!! Windows sucks!!

Who the hell cared about video support??? F*cking nobody!

It is a shame you devote effort towards video support and Mac, when linux is far more important.

Thanks for reminding me! I’ve been meaning to uninstall Songbird from my Mac anyway. It has never worked right for me. Personally, I don’t care which platforms you support or don’t support (Linux, Mac, Windows, Solaris, Android, iPhone, etc.). What I care about is that YOU MAKE A PRODUCT THAT ACTUALLY WORKS. You have failed miserably to do that. So, on my Mac, I will stick with that memory hog iTunes, and with Windows Media Player 12 on my PC. Good luck to the Songbird team, and please make a product that actually WORKS sometime in the future.

BTW, Firefox has always been a product that works excellently. If only Songbird worked even 1/1000th as good…and it has the same name as one of my favorite Abigail Zsiga songs! What an insult!

wow.

This must be the stupidest move songbird could do. I wonder what the fuck the developers were thinking. In this kind of business you must know two things:

1. Its not always about the quantity of users but the quality
2. You don’t fuck with The Linux, ever.

When the pissed-off linux users start bitching, songbird devs will regret this decision, but Im afraid it will be too late already.

Goodbye Songbird

well, I was hoping for decent alternative to iTunes rather than another me 2 product. As I delete this from my Linux AND windows platforms, I’ll just have to keep looking for a decent multi-platform alternative.

Really Sad, I have never found any better jukebox on linux and now it’s gone :’(

But it’s tru most features haven’t been ported to linux (mtp fore example)

Hopefully there ill be a new fork.

Anyway as long as others use it atleast.

ok! Your product, your rules.
I was waiting for a good ipod support… now: Banshee?, Exile?, Amarok (again)?

This smiling retard who wrote announcement talks like “Songbird singing a new tune” is a good thing. While at same time he admits that Linux users do best development, write best bug reports and do most of word of mouth marketing, he says that Songbird is decided to stick a knife in our back anyway… probably because some Linux hating corporation (Philips, hint hint) told them to do so.

It is not about being a company, it is about complete stupidity and idiotic decision making on part of Songbird team. It is about having no personality on its own. Real open source companies have some principles which are not for sale, while Songbird-like companies give up everything for shiny nickels, even if it is obvious that they are going to be left with no users when nickels dry up.

I expect that GPL is next to be chopped, since some corporations hate that too (that is probably a reason why v3 of GPL is not used). Just use some of Microsoft Shared source licences, you might also get shill checks for that. You can also patent some stuff and later use it to sue real open source media players. You can be new SCO. SCO failed, but you can do it “right”.

Really good news!

http://stoplinux.org.ru/category/news/songbird_prekraszaet_polnocennuyu_podderzhku_linux.html

This is disappointing.

Off course, Banshee… it all makes sense now. Microsoft payed to Songbird to get away from Linux so Banshee can get more popular. Banshee, a Mono app which is licensed under permissive (gift-like) MIT X11 license. So one more Mono app on every Linux desktop, one less GPL’d app. One more step towards Mono supremacy and Microsoft’s takeover of Linux universe. More material for bullying companies into paying protection rackets to Microsoft.

I hope Songbird go bankrupt ASAP. I hope you traitors root in hell.

So, iPod Touch/iPhones are FINALLY supported on Linux, and you give up on it? Really? Not that I liked your player much anyways; too bloated and buggy. Anyone wanting a better player on Linux should look at development versions of Rhythmbox; it’s amazing amazing (and with the right libraries, they support iPods, which Songbird doesn’t even want to support anymore)!

I think you’re clearly need to reconsider you priorities… You’ve lost something important behind. I just hope for a linux fork now!

These are very sad news.
I’ve been using Songbird for a few years now and kept up with all the issues that an open-source multi-platform application have not because it was the best, but because I like any application that work on all major OS (I use Windows BTW). Songbird has it’s share of problems, and for the past few versions I’ve been feeling it’s development and I are on different path. Versions were delayed forever (without any notification), closed to the public, requested features were postponed and others were inserted.
I want my songbird to be a music player first, anything else after.

I did my share of contribution, but sadly I am now looking for an alternative.

WOW!!!! This is truly unbelievable. How can the biggest and best open source music player simply give up on linux? This really shows just how much you believe
in the open source cause. Whats next are you going to start charging for your application? Mac’s dont have a very big slice of the OS pie(around 10 %) so why continue supporting them, that way you will only be supporting the one truly great and honest scrupulous, and conscientious OS of all Windows. Besides Mac users are much more likely to be happy with iTunes since Mac fanboys practically jizz in their pants over anything that has an apple logo on it. Or hear is an idea why not take a play out of google’s dont be evil playbook, and start monitoring everybody’s playlists under the guise of creating a better experience for them.

After the head-scratching delay of the last release, the announcement that the goal of podcast support would be abandoned, and the awful new default theme included in 1.4, I decided I would stick with a lighter music player on my next install. I’m pretty darn disappointed that what at one time was one of the best Linux music players is done for, but the call is yours. I agree with others that you’re probably never going to make much headway on OSX and only a little more on Windows, but Linux has plenty of good mp3 players, too, and a very small market share on top of that.

Good luck to your project! (I may still use it under Windows.)

Very disappointing. I will use aTunes (www.atunes.org) under Linux.

Your rational for making this decision is not for me to judge – it’s your company and you have to do what you feel is right.

But I’m a Linux user and I LOVE this player. My initial thought was that the reddit headline was a April Fool’s joke – and a terrible one.

Nope, it’s a terrible truth.

Really, dumping a huge customer base all to add video? This is a sad day. You obviously don’t care, but I’ll be moving to a new player, regardless of your weak attempts at softening the blow by saying someone else can do the work you’re supposed to.

I have never met a Windows-only or Mac-only person who uses Songbird. Only those who use Linux-plus-Windows or Linux-plus-Mac. Therefore, I don’t see a reason for anyone to install or use Songbird any more.

You’re going to compete with iTunes and DoubleTwist (both of which are better products than Songbird) only on the same platforms they run on? News flash: Songbird Swirling Around The Drain.

So long, guys, and thanks for what you’ve done so far. I won’t be back for your funeral in six to twelve months.

Very sad to hear this. As a lot of the above users mention Songbird was the one player I could use on my Linux and Windows machines. Looks like it’s time to go back to Winamp and Banshee.

I just recently found out about Songbird. I quickly founds far superior to RythmBox and Amarok.

Although I agree with most of the comments above about this being a disappointment, I understand the complications in supporting many platforms.

I only hope the Songbird code lives on with community support.

If there’s anything I could say to the developers, that’s THANK YOU! I for one am willing to donate money to keep Linux support. Your product is excellent, and I want the Linux desktop to prosper because of excellent software like this.

Linux use is on the rise, and Songbird will only further to add value to the experience.

-Tres

If this came a day earlier, I wouldn’t have believed it.

I thought I had found the solution to my music needs across my windows and ubuntu machines. I guess I was wrong.

Very bad decision, guys…

Disappointing. Removed from my mac and windows too.

For now, I’ll keep SB on my Windows boxes. Simply because I don’t see a compelling alternative (open source or not). As others, I’ll switch to another audio player on my Linux boxes sooner rather than later. I’m thankful for continued development on Windows.

However, I think developers are setting the wrong priorities. It appears the major development goal is to provide an alternative to iTunes. But you don’t realize that many people prefer to use separate, dedicated applications for audio and video. Imo, you already have the best audio player out there. The goal should be to make it even better. I couldn’t care less about video playback in Songbird. Even if video support was extremely comprehensive and polished, I’d still want to manage my video library separately from my audio library.

That’s very unfortunate, I guess I’ll have to drop songbird :(:(

Suprising how fast things can go. This morning I did not even think about it, but now I have installed an alternative to Songbird, and Songbird just flew of my harddrive. Hey, now I can update my system properly without having to fear to crash my favorite music player. At least one advantage.
I feel sorry for the large amount of time I invested in making Songbird better by developing the Tagger addon and some scripts to make it build a nest in current desktop environments, just to be “dropped” now like a piece of additional weight.
I agree with those who said that you are losing a large part of your userbase now. I will step back to recommend other players for both Linux and Windows, since I cannot support this anymore. You had your chance.

So long and thanks for the time Songbird was good. Do not expect me at the funeral of this bird, though.

ps: Winamp in wine is ugly, do not even try it . Good Songbird alternatives for Linux: Banshee (reeaaally nice), Amarok (good for the KDE-guys), Rhythmbox (not as good as banshee imo). But nothing can replace the huge amount of Addons one could choose of.

Why am I not surprised? Songbird is being positioned as Philips’ answer to Itunes
(first they gotta get decent hardware though.) Philips NEEDS this on the Mac and Windows – they sure as hell couldn’t care less about Linux, and POTI is gonna do what the $ says.

This was obvious when they dropped IPod support.

(anyone else still have a Philips MP3 player, that only plays encrypted MP3s?)

@David M.

Have you noticed that nearly every single comment on this page has been from a “Linux Zealot”?

What does that tell you about the working user base?

songbird sucks… Uninstaling…

I honestly cannot believe what I’m reading. There is really nothing i can say that hasn’t been said before. When i first heard about the philips partnership I though it was going to help the product, but honestly, i cannot help but wonder if they had anything to do with linux support drop (we all know how most companies do not consider linux as a plataform to take in consideration). If there is something that i loved about songbird was the fact that i could use the same application in both windows and linux. To be honest there is barely any reason for me to use songbird in windows and the fact that linux was dropped only makes me want to ditch songbird once and for all.

You should have just worked harder on improving the UI and make it faster and more usable (specially the media views). Nobody really cares about video support and being a windows/mac only application there are plenty of better alternatives around for both platforms.

Please reconsider this decision, i would hate to see an open source project with so much promise dying.

The fact that some linux haters came here to “celebrate” your awful decision indicates a lot…
Songbird was everything for me and a program that i could be proud for being a linux user…
What a disappointment…
NOW LET’S FORK!!!

I liked Songbird, but I like my Ubuntu more than Songbird… and still we have Rythnbox and Banshee including the marvellous Ubuntu One Song Store! In a world of Ubuntu (and Linux) who need only songbird? Plenty of alternatives are out there…

Look, we will have songbird 2.0 , ok!?
And we can use the 2.1 to build a songbird to linux, all right !?

No matter, I’ll just pretend I never liked you anyway :/

But honestly, even though I’m using Amarok at the moment, this is an almost heartbreaking loss. I can only hope the community manages to keep Songbird for Linux alive…

Bad news… but every developer understands it who needs to get paid for the stuff he develops… I believe that there is a need for an alternative on Windows and Mac… So this is heading the right way. But please don’t loose all your dreams! What i mean is the spirit of songbird. Somehow this gets lost in the last time. The blog is near before dead since Laura has moved. The web isnt emparaced as it had been before. Just making a second iTunes isnt the right way.

I had started to use Songbird on Windows because it was cross-platform, and continued to use it on Ubuntu GNU/Linux. Looks like I’ll have to find something else. It was nice knowing you, bye…

you guis should try cmus: it’s a very fast console music player.
it supports Ogg/Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Musepack, WavPack, WMA, Wav, MPEG-4/AAC, MOD.
avaiable in ubuntu and debian repo.
better than songbird

Pity – Oh well it was quite bloated but I liked it. It could dig out a lot of stuff about the band you were currently playing with the Mashtape plugin.

If people are looking for a cross platform music player the Java based aTunes isn’t bad and stands up quite well compared to Songbird. It doesn’t support the ipod like Songbird but anyway Rhythmbox does.

Rhythmbox is better than I remember anyway. I am about to uninstall Songbird. Bye for now, I might come back to to good Linux community fork of Songbird if one materializes.

Wow we have 40+ users using songbird right now on Ubuntu and about 60 users on windows. NONE of our Mac customers use songbird they just use Itunes. we install songbird on every system we sell. Linux and Windows. Now I am going to have to find something else for our Linux users. We are very disappointed in this decision. This may result in us no longer recommending Songbird to any of our customers.

@foolishgrunt.

The more popular something gets, the more people use it. Ubuntu is getting popular, and of course that’s going to mean that there are going to be whining, demanding morons that use it. Get used to it, it’s going to get a whole lot worse. Sooner or later, there’s going to be lame television ads a la Mac about Ubuntu. It’ll get the job done, though, a la Mac.

You want your elitist little circle of friends? There’re plenty of distros other than Ubuntu; go meet with Gentoo. Go write a program for Puppy. But don’t label all of us Ubuntu users (some of us that *gasp* compile our own kernels!) as whining idiots.

That aside, this is a very unfortunate decision. While people really shouldn’t be screaming obscenities at POTI, they have a right to call this move stupid.

Here here Chauncellor! Seems we were thinking similar thoughts.

Oh and on sb…I can’t think of one single reason why one in sb’s situation would consider this a good move from a business standpoint, hell any standpoint, OTHER than their backers (the ones with the $) having their own agenda. Of course you can’t blame Phillip’s for this, as they never tried to say otherwise. SB however DID entrench itself in the open source community. SB might want to casually remind their sugar daddies that this is “community suicide” regardless what single users personally believe…alienating themselves from the whole.

People on Windows and MAC already have tons of s/w alternatives! R.I.P Songbird

Isn’t this too late? April fools was day 1 o.o

It looks like there are not too many happy people here in the comments.

I will paste the most interesting comment:

“scruss Apr 2, 2010 3:27 pm Permalink

So you’re now providing an iTunes alternative, but only on the platforms that iTunes runs on? So long, been good to know ya.”

Insightful

I can’t wait for you jerks to check the anonymous NOFX usage stats and see that nobody’s using the video features that you’ve worked so hard on for so long.

I hope Philips is paying you well to override the features your users have been asking for for months.

Why the heck did they bother building this thing with XUL and Gekko if they weren’t going to keep it multiplatform? And GStreamer as the sound rendering engine???

They could have saved alot of time and used MFC, the MSHTML and DirectX.

Easy solution. Lose the Mac port… keep Linux. The iTunes infrastructure is way too strong on a Mac to ever think you are going to convert a significant number of users.

Unless you are cooking an alternative to Airport Express, Apple TV, the iPhone Remote App, and the iPad, you can count your converts on one hand.

Now Linux, on the other hand, needs a first class audio player.

Wow. See yah, Songbird and POTI. I thought I found a nice media player for Linux that would eventually be able to rip CDs, play video, and manage my mp3 player. I guess not.

This really kills the mood of community, cross-platform, and open source. Hopefully some skilled developers take up Songbird’s code, clean it up, and release a kick-ass media player for Linux. The kick-ass media player that Songbird should have been.

big mistake

It’s short-sighted decision.

Why keeping Mac port and leaving Linux? Did u know that most of your localizations on different languages made from Linux users? With this stupid decision you will loose not only community support, but also market share on different countries.

This is suicide decision for an open source project.

Oh well, I’ve got Amarok. Which is cross-platform too, AFAIK.

Shame on you guys.

It’s an open source project right? Which means that if the open source community wants they can make and send patches with XV/VDPAU/GL/Whatever support to make it work on Linux.

Then distros mantainers could opt to build and include in distros still, just like with any other software. Maybe the community should help more and be more comprehensive instead of being too whiny and demanding.

Goodbye little Songbird, they’ve killed you. R.I.P.

I have just installed Rhythmbox and uninstalled Songbird from my Linux box. Irony is that Rhythmbox is less of a memory hog, much quicker UI, gapless playback, music importing from CD and iPod HAL, CD burning, HAL detection and heaps of other goodies.

It is sad that Songbird will never release another version for Linux as I liked the UI, but on the other side I found probably a much better alternative.

And to all those who moan about those of us who are unhappy with Songbird’s decision; sure you need money to run a company, but the last any company needs is to piss of its users and get bad publicity for it.

This is incredibly unfortunate and makes me extremely upset as a Linux user and Songbird developer. While Linux may represent only a small minority of the user base, we certainly represent more than our fair share of the community involvement. It is that community involvement that makes Songbird unique and a threat to the juggernaut that is iTunes. How can Songbird hope to compete against an entrenched, commercial entity without encouraging its developers? I’ll be with Songbird until the bitter end, but this is terribly upsetting and something I disagree with whole-heartedly.

bye songbird .

Fuking Mozilla $$$$$$$$$ fom Microsoft Windows

I am Google Chrom

I don’t believe your stated reason for stopping Linux support.

Can Songbird’s development be totally given to it’s linux community? It seems strange to completely ditch support for the fastest growth market at this point when so much of the groundwork is already completed.

Interesting to see Songbird giving it’s competitors such a good chance to get ahead and establish themselves when there are opportunities for becoming the standard music app in so many distros since the collapse of RhythmBox. Banshee should be easy to compete with as it is Mono (.Net) based whereas Songbird had the ethical edge.

Could Songbird(linusx version) be given to the community perhaps through something like LaunchPad?

Good luck and regards from
Tom

Pff you are just losers.
Adios.

Who the fuck wanted this?
You totally fucked up a great program.

Slow clap all around.
How does that corporate dick taste?

So this is not April fool joke after all?

Ok, there is only one thing we can do now: FORK.

We make better player on top of Songbird codebase, make it truly cross platform (but Linux focused), make real open source company to support it and promote it which will ultimately run Songbird out of the business.

Then we watch how Songbird crumbles and how idiots who made this decision cry.

NOT USING Songbird ANYMORE. Sorry..

Bye-bye Songbird.

Nice to have used you for a while but after this bit of news, I’ll find something else to use – even if it’s iTunes.

I believe you just shot yourself in the foot, Songbird…

MacOS X has no future as platform for Songbird because Apple make iTunes and like to control entirely the Mac ecosystem.

I can understand companies target windows as the main platform when they make multiplatform apps, but Linux is becoming more popular and it is already more popular than MacOS X in many countries.

Please review your decision to dump the linux version of Songbird. If you need to cut one platform, choose Mac.

Linux fans have been telling us that Linux is becoming relevant for the past 10 years. My advice: don’t fall into their delusion.

As a developer of cross-platform applications, I understand that there is always an additional burden with supporting each platform. However, the decision to drop Linux support is rather myopic – it simply encourages more platform-specific code to accumulate, which should not be present in a cross-platform codebase. Let’s not kid ourselves here – once a platform is no longer tested for or supported, library dependencies creep in that prevent new releases from ever working again.

Also, I suspect perhaps download counts are what drive the perception of Linux as an unimportant platform for Songbird – do note that most downloads probably come from distro-specific repositories, so unless you have some alternative tracking mechanism, you may be vastly underestimating the number of users you will lose. And let’s not forget that Linux support is what gives Songbird a good deal of media coverage as an iTunes alternative, media coverage that is also read by Windows users. I hope that, in the age when Linux is becoming a growing presence on the market, you will not discard this opportunity for continued success.

PS: Your specific reasons for dropping Linux support has not been clearly stated. Is it a sparkling, new library that’s only available for Windows and Mac OS X as I suspect, or is it simply that you wish to cut the amount of testing you do? If it’s the latter, do note that testing on multiple platforms is one of the most effective way to identify poorly written code that will later show up as bugs on other OSes.

WHAT? ARE YOU F*CKING CRAZY?
Songbird is the ONLY good iTunes alternative for Linux!

Thanks for reminding me to delete this thing from my Mac, too!

Sad news, but I understand your reasoning.

What if you still helped a little on the development (coordination, for example), but open source volunteers took up most of the development? What if you asked for financial support. Set a target level of money that would need to be donated for the linux version to continue development?

I would be very interested in your answers to these quesitons.

Thank you and best of luck in the future!

This is actually the first time I’d ever heard of Songbird and I actually installed it on my Mac – pretty happy with what I’ve seen over the last 10 minutes or so…

But, even though I’m a Mac user, I’m a FreeBSD/Windows Server/Windows 7 user at work – on a daily basis… I understand the need to drop support for one community, but why don’t you all focus on moving to a platform that supports everything in a one-for-all attitude, like Java? While I can’t stand it myself, it may help your situation…

Without Linux support Songbird is no longer interesting for me. The only real advantage I’ve always seen is a very iTunes-like interface and support for Linux.

I suspect the reason is because Philips does not intend to support Linux with their players so they encourages SB to drop support. The bottom line is that they sold out to Philips. Philips want video support, Philips wants then to drop Linux support and focus on Video support so that they can have something to compete with Itunes. Apparently Philips wants something with the same features as Itunes including video i suppose. I guess Itunes doesn’t work with their players. This is the only logical reason why they dropped Linux for Mac support. Philips hopes to sell players to Mac fanboys and so since Itunes wont work with philips players on the mac they need this to work on the mac to support their players. Its is a pipe dream on the part of Philips to think Apple drones will even think about purchasing their players instead of Apple branded one. And Philips could have had the good will of the Linux community.

Well I don’t think I will be using songbird. If you take from a group of people then shut them out wow that is just bad. Your loss.

I wish I could say I am surprised, but frankly – it seems somehow expected.

A word of advice… a partnership with any large commercial enterprise can come to an end with a phone call that you are being dropped -”Bubye.” Whatever enterprises you imagine you have gotten into bed with – can kick you out more easily than you dropped support for the Linux community. Large enterprises often have many projects underway all the time with smaller companies, and they cull these projects periodically. I am suggesting that you might enjoy the rewards of your karma.

Anyway, enough of that. I want to add my vote to aTunes as a cross-platform music player. I would also mention Jajuk as a player I have used extensively in the past.

Good bye.

I’m sad about this news. I’m a linux guy and I’m using songbird everyday…

You could, at least, develop a plugin to connect Amarok to SongBird website. What the developers say about it?

bad call. Seriously, bad call. That’s the nicest way I can put it.

Very unfortunate to hear and I’m sure the decision wasn’t easy to make.

Maybe you can blog in a bit of detail what the big problems with the port are?

Hello,

I’m deeply sorry to hear about that. I’ve been using songbird on Linux since the very beginning.

And when I say the very beginning, I mean one of the very first public release you made (see I don’t even remember, the version number. it was 0.1 or 0.2, around 2006).

I don’t clearly understand (neither from your post nor the comments) if their will be a built (but not tested) version of SB in the nighties or if we’ll have to build it from the nighties sources ?

Whatever, I don’t have time to play this kind of game, I’ll start looking on the Rhythmbox side to see what they have to offer.

Once again, sorry for you.

PS : I do hope though that all the conspiracy theoricians I’ve read above are dead wrong or I won’t even be sorry anymore.

Well there goes Songbird’s appeal….

That is too bad you are dropping Linux. I know it was a tough decision to make.

Bye bye songbird. We won’t need it anyway, it might better that way. How much money did you get from Balmer?

::Shrug::, go ahead and drop support for my operating system of choice. I’ll proceed to drop my support for what was once a promising project but now is clearly going to crap.

I’m completely disappointed…

Wow. What a foolish move. I’ve been following your blog for years now for one reason and one reason only — you were building a credible cross-platform alternative to iTunes. I hope you’ve got some ace killer feature up your sleeve because from where I’m standing it looks like you’ve just dropped the only thing that made your project interesting.

Songbird for Linux!

Listen carefully. Can you hear that? No? – well I’m not surprised – its the sound of Songbird becoming irrelevant.

I thought Songbird was a project I could really get behind and support – innovative features, an excellent philosophy, cross-platform and a great API for development. But without Linux support, I’ll have to start looking for an alternative.

Bye bye guys, bad news this time, another user that u loose

Sadly, I’ll be another of your users who has to say good-bye now … on Windows as well

90% of the volunteers of Songbird are lovers of Linux (although many do not use as personal desktop).
Dropping them would drop their biggest army.

Take a poll in songbird?
Who here would like to use Linux as your favorite desktop in one day?

what about a nice cup of gtfo then. bye.

I also was using Songbird on all three platforms. It wasn’t my primary player on Mac or Windows because I was waiting for the player to improve. But now I don’t see the point in using it at all… so I won’t.

This is a shockingly bad move. I’ve been looking for a replacement for Amarok after their version 2 rewrite, and was hopeful Songbird could fill the gap. Plus, I could run it on my Windows box, too! Well, so much for that idea.

I understand that you have to prioritize and make tough decisions about how to use your resources, but you’re just shooting yourselves in the foot. Without your base of enthusiastic Linux-using supporters, who is going to be recommending Songbird to everyone else?

jaja, esto es una porquería, no voy a volver a bajar un programa opensource para windows en mi vida, si de todas formas puedo usar programas piratas, y lo segundo ni en linux ni en windows, ahora uso winamp en windows, y exaile en linux·!·!·!·

Hey, I know it’s just business but you said yourself the Linux community is passionate. Songbird is built on the backs of the open source community. Whatever. There are better music players.

Hey Songbird, welcome to The Collectivity. Resistance is futile.

I have been a vocal supporter of Songbird. In fact, *every* single person I know who uses Songbird, does so because of my recommendation.

This is classic “bait and switch”, which I don’t tolerate from any product or company. I am especially bothered because one of the main reasons I recommended it to my friends was because it has Linux support. It is important for me that apps run on at least Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.

I am now going to be going back to all of those friends and discouraging the use of Songbird. I will point out all of Songbirds flaws and any features it lacks, and make it clear to my friends that the developers do not respect the wishes of their core community.

There’s another comment on here the developers ought to reread over and over again:

>> One thing you should know, don’t piss off your Linux user base.

Oh yes, especially since, like me, these users are likely to be “tech guru” people for all their friends and family.

Here’s my advice: Make cross platform support your biggest prioirty, and adjust your timetable for other development as required. Frankly, I’ve written cross platform software for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX…. it’s not that hard.

Going back to my earlier comment about “Bait and Switch”, please read the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch

“Bait and Switch” is unacceptable. I would, in fact, go so far as to call it unethical.

Bye bye, Songbird. The loyalty doesn’t go both ways. You are now off:

My Windows computer at work
My wife’s Mac

I hope you, the developers, can hear the loud ‘whoosh’ of your userbase leaving.

Bye.

I think i am swiching my default song player from songbird to rhytmbox or amarok becose drobdown o a linux support.

Well , the player that got known with LINUX , ditching its support for it …..

you know what ?

GoodBye … And f**** Y**** traitors

Not that i matter, but i this is the sad day for me. i moved to ubuntu because of songbird, and now i am being droped this is disappointment. i now know how it feels thanks its been a good ride time to move, i will no longer use this program and or check your site daily like i used too. good bye

To anyone who, like me, is considering forking songbird…

I think what is really important is to get a fork going that is not just Linux specific, but is cross platform in the same way that songbird always was. The goal would be to always be at least as good or better than the current version of songbird, in every way.

This way, we can continue to move forward. I imagine also that many songbird contributors and extension authors would be interested in such a fork, and would likely support it over the official one.

“we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird”…
You will kill a big part of your community.

To MOST COMMENTERS out here… thats just not fair! I believe we all shared a dream which was now put to the ground of reality. Also called “real-wolrd-business” or also so called… “getting the money to pay the bills”. Actually we should be sad and not angry. I am sure the developers of songbird whished there would be another option. Yes make a fork… Yes, you can do that in YOUR free time. But they need to earn money to survive in the hard battle against a giant called iTunes. That’s the point! So calm down and don’t say it was an evil plan! It was a dream which came down to the ground of reality!

had already noticed that Songbird was abandoning the Linux when it stopped to sync the iPod and greatly decreases its use. Now I will never use it, I will withdraw my notebook. Goodbye Sondbird.

Loosers, morons, assholes, fuckers, Linux kicks ass.
Lousy Apple/ Microsoft loving pricks, kiss my ass!

Well, rhythmbox always suited me anyway

:’(

Oh look what blog is afraid of bad comments, I have posted 2 other comments and they were deleted.
Feh tells you that the songbird developers not only dont give a crap about open source but free speech!
Its a crappy program anyway, and most of the linux players out there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times better then songbird.
Kiss my big fat arse songbird, long live linux!

If I can only use Songbird on platforms that iTunes already supports, why would I gimp myself?

May you sink quickly.

How do you do something like that!!! I thing Songbird is the best player for Linux!!! It’s the closest to iTunes but better! So how you dare!!! I use Songbird and fallow it since the project even doesn’t have a release, and this is news are really devasting!

To answer some recurring flamebait comments:

* No, no one paid us off to ditch Linux.
* No, Philips did not ask us in any way, shape or form to drop Linux.
* We are not closing the source to Songbird. It will remain an open platform.
* We are maintaining our Linux build infrastructure and will ensure that it continues to compile and run the unit-test suite.
* We have a lot of folks in house that use Linux every day and they will keep developing Songbird on Linux.
* The majority of our add-on developers and contributors use Windows as their primary OS.
* Most of our bug reports come in from users that use Windows.
* We are not exploiting anyone that happens to use Linux and has filed bug reports, translated portions of Songbird or written add-ons. Anyone assuming that’s the case is mistaken, plain and simple.
* Songbird is not distributed as part of any distribution currently because our dependencies do not line up with default versions distros ship with.
* Our usage numbers are based on active user count which has nothing to do with downloads.

All of your angry comments are not constructive in any way. I thank the few reasonable folks who have replied to the barrage of hate. We are very grateful for your support.

This was never an easy decision for us but we simply do not have the QA and development resources to continue officially supporting Linux.

For the high and mighty out there that think that we receive tons of development help from Linux developers, I hate to disappoint you but that’s just not true. We’ve received less than 30 patches (mostly small changes, which we still love BTW, keep those coming) in 5 years. Most of those patches were contributed by Windows and Mac developers.

@ The Internet (I can’t believe I just said that):

Open source means just what it sounds like: the source code is open to the public, and free to be edited and redistributed. By making the source code available to the public, POTI have already fulfilled any “philosophical obligation” they may have had to the term “open source.” Any further sense of “idealism” is completely up to them to decide: they never once signed a contract that said they would continue to support development on the GNU/Linux platform.

Just because Songbird is an open source project doesn’t mean it’s forbidden to be profitable. That’s not an oxymoron, it’s just a different business plan. I’d be willing to bet that the revenue brought in by partnership deals with other companies (such as Qtrax and Phillips) are a big part of why Songbird has reached the level of success it has today. Being able to employ a staff of full-time developers is what sets apart a lot of the most successful players (iTunes, Winamp, WMP, etc) and so far it’s also been what sets Songbird apart from other open source media players. It’s been built into an incredibly feature-rich player, in less time than Banshee and way less time than Rhythmbox.

Bottom line: you have no right to act like you’ve been betrayed. POTI is a company, and they have to do what’s best for them in order to reach their main target audience, or else they won’t continue. Like it or not, Windows users are a much bigger target audience than Linux users.

@aus:

“* We have a lot of folks in house that use Linux every day and they will keep developing Songbird on Linux.”
.
.
“For the high and mighty out there that think that we receive tons of development help from Linux developers, I hate to disappoint you but that’s just not true. We’ve received less than 30 patches”

Those statements conflict a little guy.

Don’t lie, don’t think your users are stupid.

The only reason to drop Linux support, is because your backers told you to. Phillips holds the money bag and you’ve got to dance to their tune.

I understand you’ve got to put food on the table and whatever, but you need to understand that you’ve basically just taken a giant crap on your fan base.

I hope you are all happy with your decision.

Please tell me this is a late April Fool’s joke.. Linux NEEDS SongBird!

@ Alex:

You’re again missing the meaning of the term “open source.” Releasing the source code of a piece of software does not surrender all legal rights to it; intellectual property and copyright laws still apply. Songbird is undeniably the intellectual property of the POTI developers who wrote the code for it, and as such they control the direction of the project. No user-submitted patch will ever find it’s way into the main branch unless it’s approved by POTI, because they’re the only ones allowed to publish a piece of software under the name “Songbird.” Even software available under strong copyleft licenses such as the GNU GPL are, by definition, copyrighted. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

And about Red Hat… if what you were saying were true, they would allow free Enterprise Linux downloads and charge ONLY for their support services. But that’s clearly not the case. Red Hat does charge a subscription fee before allowing any download of their Enterprise Linux title. This is legal because large portions of the code for that OS was actually produced by the Red Hat Inc employees. That makes them the copyright owner of that particular distribution, and they’re free to charge for it if they please.

Let me get this straight, so you’re basic ditching the only platform were you are relevant. That’s a good way to do business… congrats!

Ouch. This is disappointing and depressing — I’ve never particularly cared for Amarok, Rhthymbox, etc., and the the first three things I always added to my desktop Linux installs were VLC, Songbird, and Audacity in that order.

I understand the need to retain focus and prioritize effectively, but I could care less about which smartphones Songbird has been ported to — are that many more users really using SB on phones than on (non-phone) Linux distros?

shame on you !!! it’s really not that hard to support Linux.

You’re better off firing that new MBA !)(&#! that you just hired.

I wonder how many of you that are complaining now are users that have never contributed either financially or through product support and development.

This happens to open source projects all over the place. Pre-empt project closure, by supporting your favourite open source projects through donations, publicity, help with development and support.

I can’t believe it. Is this a 1-st April fool? You drop Linux for Windows (and Mac OS)…. Unbelievable! Now it is the time you to do so and with Firefox and Thunderbird and so long to Mozilla!

We are the people which give you the needed and indispensable feed-back and bug reports. Without us you are lost.

And I wanna say something even more: Google Chrome is the better browser but I keep using Firefox only because I believe in Mozilla and do NOT WANT to abandon it!

You give me a pretty good reason to start using Chrome and letting Google devour you. You decide which users are more important to you!

@Miro Hadzhiev (and some others)

You’re making a confusion the songbird developpers are *not* the mozilla (firefox/thunderbird/…) developpers.

Songbird is *based* on mozilla platform/framework (you name it …) it has nothing to do with mozilla (afak)

First ipod support, now this. Well I guess this was a fun ride.. Goodbye!

That little logo of yours used to represent something fun, something unique, something clever…and now, without Linux support, it represents nothing but disappointment. Sheer and utter disappointment! A lack of metacity support really bothered me anyway..This is me removing Songbird from my Linux system and my Windows system.

400 comments in one day….!!

Huge mistake to stop supporting Linux. What are you thinking? Or are you not thinking?

Epic fail and goodbye songbird

You SB guys sound like a person trying to explain the good reasons to have killed your father …

But it’s your business. Time to look for another player …

WOW.

I thought you wouldn’t be as stupid as this but you guys surprised me.

It’s the only damn place you have a considerable amount of loyal users and you’re going to drop it?

Do you know what open-source means?

Have a nice fail. Lets find another player.

Sooo… great.
Your dev team seems to suck. First you break songbird, then aw, lets drop linux support. These guys cant do anything to us.
That’s the problem when a company develops open source First it gets bloat, then it gets commercial, dropping free platforms.

I prefer not to support you in any way then, uninstalling sb on all pcs

Expect closed source songbird, with only windows support soon Also, let it install genuine advantage with it.

And SB achieves another milestone. More that 400 comments for the first time on blog. I remember on 1.0 launch they had around 300+. Good work guys. I know i have no rights to say anything. I don’t sponsor SB development neither i create patch for Linux SB. But did quite a bit of QA. Yeh..thts community. Any words from frenchbirds…??

i came from indonesia…
it’s sad to hear that songbird was drop form linux.
good bye songbird…
hope you make a right decision to you future..

The last thing that we cant do is to boikotaz the philips products and never again say a good think to friends etc about philips and their product
The dont like open source and open source community and is simple we will never get money for us.
Thera are much better companies like Lg,Samsung and most of their products run linux.

As a SB user on all three platforms I can do nothing but drop my support for SB on Windows & Mac by uninstalling its respective versions. The hypocritical speech given about priorities, development and ideology is offensive to anyone in their right mind. Please, do continue to harvest FLOSS efforts for your own commercial gain.
“How do you sleep at night? – On top of a pile of money with many beautiful women on it.”

you guys suck BIG TIME…
sorry but i can see you in 1 year, not existing anymore.

“NOFX” ? more like “good riddance”

Well.. Looks like I won’t be using Songbird anytime soon. They can go support their closed source OS’s. Wonder who accepted the bribe to take this path? Good riddance, plenty of other substitutes out there that will remain Linux friendly. Suggest everyone go tell these guys where to shove it. Oh and no, you don’t remain loyal to Linux if you remove support. You aren’t, period.

@Aus

Fair enough… I still see a fork in the community and sources though.

This realy sucks! I use and love Songbird because it’s crossplattform.

Without Linux support I will definitly stop using Songbird on Windows and on Linux. This was a realy good Project and I’m said it’s over.

Perhaps some day another Player will fill the gap.

Goodbye songbird!

root@hades:~# apt-get remove songbird
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
songbird
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
After this operation, 52.8MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y
(Reading database … 291746 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing songbird …
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils …
Processing triggers for libc-bin …
ldconfig deferred processing now taking place
root@hades:~#

[...]Rhythmbox has always been an excellent music player for me.[...]

Songbird might as well just go proprietary now since the source will be useless to Linux users as its gonna be missing so much Linux stuff. Users of Win/Mac don’t even care about the source being available.

As a developer myself I can’t really see how this decision was made. Do ye guys realize how big a hole ye dug for the project?? Songbird will lose alot of testers, bug reporters and definitely lose contributors/developers.

Brutal. Good luck with that.

Sad news. The decision to drop linux and convert songbird from a great multiplattform musicplayer to another videoplayer for win/mac makes me sad.

But developers have all the right to decide what they want to do.

Thanks for the opportunity to have a real good multiplattform song player until today.

So … Linux is now in the same support category that Windows 7 has been in? I can live with that.

All these comments are totally psychotic. Songbird is still missing a lot of features that are important to me, so I don’t use it that much. Yet. But I think it continues to be an important and promising project.

Wow…. that’s alot of comments. I’ve been staying out of this so far, just watching the hurt and dejected comments roll in. I feel I have to say something, as a sort of devil’s advocate.

I have, like many of you, been with Songbird since the first release. I have watched development much like a child watching the nest in the tree outside of his window (not to say I haven’t offered the little chicks some food every now and again; I’ve bought quite a few shirts for myself and gifts). I celebrated the first flight, encouraged many others to take up birdwatching, and recently, watched the little birds make new nests for themselves with suspicious mates. These nests seem to be much more private than I would like, and now it seems that one of the birds has died, which saddens me greatly. But as much as it saddens me and as much as I can sympathize with Linux users (Ive been watching out the Window, so to speak), I have to understand that sometimes these things happen.

I don’t know a whole lot about programming and development beyond the basics, but I do know that where there are limited resources, sometimes priorities need to be made. Was this the right bird to exclude? Idk… I would have to say that there are certainly many angles to consider, and that I don’t know enough to really say. My opinion is that this was a bad decision, but that’s just opinion; there aren’t a whole lot of hard facts. I honestly don’t believe there is any conspiracy with Phillips or M$ or anything like that; that’s just silly. I think they made a judgment call, and a difficult one at that.

I have a lot of thoughts, but I think I’m gonna leave my rant at that…. Feel free to respond with anger or whatever emotion you may feel: Vent.

This is disappointing and stupid.
The blog entry doesn’t even make sense as not supporting everything but available is still better than not available at all.

The new features aren’t even important, WTF !

@Foolish grunt

>”And about Red Hat… if what you were saying were true, they would allow free Enterprise Linux downloads and charge ONLY for their support services. But that’s clearly not the case. Red Hat does charge a subscription fee before allowing any download of their Enterprise Linux title. This is legal because large portions of the code for that OS was actually produced by the Red Hat Inc employees. That makes them the copyright owner of that particular distribution, and they’re free to charge for it if they please.”<

This is not true. You do not distinguish "Free as in Freedom" from "Free as in price". Which means that you either do not have a clue about FLOSS or you doing that intentionally.

Did you heard about CentOS? It is 100% same as RHEL, just without trademarked logos and name. I happen to be typing this from CentOS box. In case you do not know what trademarks are (and I would not be surprised because you showed you do not have a clue), think artworks and stuff. Code is same. Whole RHEL is open source, excluding few tiny WiFi card firmwares which are distributed as blobs. GPL does not forbid you to charge for redistribution. Red Hat obey GPL. If they would not SFLC would be all over them because RHEL can not work without glibc and other GNU stuff which is copyrighted by FSF (and not by RH employees who might have written most of it), and RMS does not tolerate any GPL violation whatsoever.

So please stop spreading FUD, I know that Songbird guys are calling people (and paying?) to defend them from total lost off open source credibility (which I think it is a lost cause by now) , but you would really need to get a clue if you want to be of service. Hint: Spreading lies about iconic community builder and vendor with perfect open source record such as Red Hat… all in purpose to make Songbird look better… that is not going to help your case at all.

And other who are supportive to this shameful decision for songbird: Yes, rants do not represent FLOSS community, that is true, But this is big slap for Linux users, GPL'd program whose developers are talking about open source ideology suddenly dumps only truly open source OS. Songbird has all right to do that, but please, stop saying that you care about some ideology while doing that. It is a hypocrisy and only angers people even more. Admit that you did it for money and shatter last bit of illusion that you are open source community builder.

Yes, now that Mac and Windows users have MSC/MTP, video playback, CD ripping, and just about every other feature that we expect from a modern media player, it’s time to drop Linux support altogether and focus on those other platforms which are falling behind…

A year ago I complained that MSC was being developed for Windows and Mac only. I was told then that it was your long term plans to add support to Linux, but you couldn’t say when exactly. When I pressed for more details, I was assured that it probably would not take longer than a year.

And now a year later, no MSC, no MTP, no CD ripping, no video playback, and apparently, no Songbird altogether. I can’t say I didn’t see this coming, but it definitely proves your irrelevance.

I love your interface, and design, and ease of use, I only run linux, of course…
I understand however I hope at some point, you reconsider, and I hope that your eventual return to Linux will be as widely advertised as your departure. as for now, I will continue to download the developer builds, because, quite frankly, you are still the best. We Linux users are a hardy lot, and to be honest, songbird does what I need already, one thing I would like to see Is a toggle switch for the web browsing capibility, to reduce the footprint on the system, while not in use.

This is very disappointing. I dropped using Amarok on Linux because Songbird was just so much simple and easy to use. So, I guess back to using Amarok again. You’re really making a mistake to not support Linux. Sucks!

A sad day indeed, ive been following the linux development for years now. I just wanted to comment my farewell. Ill be concentrating my bug reports and fixes for banshee or amarok from now on.

Songbird: “Listen, Linux…it’s not you, it’s me”.

I loved songbird and I used it often, on linux and windows but now that you are dropping the linux support you are losing me, and many others. Thanks for nothing.

emerge -C songbird

“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.”

If the engineers develop on the Linux platform, why would you drop it, seems they should have a better working Linux version, than they would on other platforms since they work with the Linux.

You dropped ipod support and that was strike one. You drop Linux support now and thats strike two. No, better yet just fuck this shit. You have killed off the only two reasons I used songbird, linux+ipod. You aren’t even on my computer anymore.

I’m not angry or hateful. I’ve liked (and sometimes disliked) Songbird, but you’ve got to admit that for most of us that used it, it was because the same app is available on Linux and $DESKTOP_OS. The product performance hasn’t been good (on Linux/Windows), certainly not at the level of iTunes on Windows or Amarok 1.4 on Linux.

Thus, this seems suicidal to me. If I’m going to have to use platform-specific apps again, Songbird loses anywhere it competes. *What I’d like to see is a list of what contributions you need from your Linux user community in order to preserve a fully cross-platform application.* We may (or may not) be willing and able to provide those things, but at least we’ll know what needs to be done.

I do hope you succeed with your new direction, and that it enables you to come back with an updated Linux version. I just don’t see that happening when you’re so outclassed on Windows and Mac. (For non-iTunes users, DoubleTwist is far superior on those platforms.)

Come on! I’ve just discovered it and now you’re telling me it’s over? It was a really good piece of code- I hope it will come back some day.

Oh please cheer up, Microsoft has decided to follow the example of the Songbird developers and drop support for Windows Media Player on Windows to concentrate on a narrow set of options, first off they will make sure the bloated mediocre WMP is availabe to Linux users.

Now, banshee

@G – I would gladly pay for Songbird on Linux. It’s a great application and has a great future.

emerge -C songbird

************************************
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also, did anyone notice that the usage percent for Linux is higher then Mac?

Linux 7.7%
Linux 64 3.2%
———————–
Linux = 10.9%

Mac = 10.8%

I’m truly sorry to see the day that I must quite using Songbird but this seems to be the day. Farewell Songbird, I knew you well. Songbird without Linux support is dead to me.

As a Windows user who gradually shifted his apps over to cross-platform ones that would allow me to switch to Linux with minimal application pain, this news saddens me. Having used Linux for almost a year as my main home machine, it was nice to see Songbird continuing to mature on my new platform of choice.

As others have pointed out, Linux seems to have as much usage as MacOS, though perhaps some Linux specific skillsets are needed on your team and those aren’t there anymore or worth staffing anymore. That’s a pity. I wish the community would step up but I’m doubtful – I don’t know that Songbird ever reached a critical mass given so many other Linux specific music players already exist.

I really like the Songbird interface (using gekko, making it extensible using CSS/HTML, etc, and that the plugins were cross-platform)

Goodbye Songbird…Goodbye Philips. I am not sad, nor disappointed. It’s Songbird who will lose out on this deal, not the Linux community. Time will tell.

I don’t really buy it that these usage statistics bolster the argument to discontinue support for Linux.

The statistics show that Linux users file the same number of bugs and contribute the same amount to add-on development as other users despite the fact that Songbird has seen almost no new features for Linux in over a year. We should expect those numbers to be a lot lower. After all, how is a Linux user going to file a bug on CD RIP, MSC, MTP, or video playback if those services don’t even exist on their operating system? The fact of the matter is that Linux is what most open source software developers use and if you want their support and contributions, you need to support Linux. Personally, I think this project is going to die out without it.

As I see in your chart Linux has 10.9% of the users and Mac OS X has only 10.8% so, with this in vision shouldn’t you ditch Mac OS X instead of Linux?

Translators and website visitors are also more on Linux than in Mac OS X.

You even say that “While our Linux users are some of the most passionate, do some killer development, and always provide tremendous input as to whether we’re on the right path or not” and besides that you ditch them?

This is not understandable at all. I foresee a Songbird fork on the near horizon and you will be the ones who will loose on the long run.

By dropping support for Linux you make one thing very clear: Songbird will not be “the Firefox of media players” as Firefox fully supports Linux.

While I still do not like that support is being dropped for Linux (and I still think it’s a bit silly that Linux is being dropped in favor of OS X), I’m comforted in the fact that it seems there will be a community driven fork (tentatively named Lyrebird). Also, uninstalling Songbird has forced me to find a new player; I’ve been using Guayadeque for the past few days and am pleased with how mature it is for such a young player. Its future development looks to be pretty exciting.

However, I again urge the Songbird dev team to reconsider this decision.

@ g:

To be fair, I’ll admit that I didn’t look closely enough at the distribution terms of RHEL. I was right in my assertion that it’s only downloadable for a fee, but I wasn’t aware that the source code was still freely available. I apologize for misrepresenting the nature of the project.

But before you start accusing me of FUDing, I’ll thank you to look up the difference between “copyright” and “trademark.” Then look up the exact terms of the GPL and just see how many times the word “copyright” is used. Take a look at the legal rights reserved for the authors of an open source project, and you’ll see that I’m not nearly as confused as you think I am.

Although I can understand closing comments, it should be noted that this kind of response should have been expected. You dropped support for an OS that a fair amount of people used (comparable to Mac users) and probably recommended it to a fair amount of the Windows users that you currently have. I’m sure it was a tough decision to make, and in my opinion I believe it was a poor one, but a lot of the comments here are mainly people telling you that if you’re not going to support their OS, they’re not going to support your product. Did you expect them to all just sit happily and say “I guess that’s for the best?” Of course not! They obviously enjoyed your product enough to use and recommend it and they feel betrayed that you would make such a huge decision without at least giving forewarning.

Nice going. You just lost a good chunk of your users. Why the foreplay? Why not just go ahead and drop support for every OS except Windows 7? …Songbird is clearly not community-driven.

I’ve used Songbird since version 0.1, and it was buggy, but showed hope. Then they dropped the iPod support and now they drop the Linux support. I guess I’m stuck with Windows and iTunes until Linux has a media player that I don’t absolutely hate. I feel extremely betrayed. I won’t use Songbird again, on any OS, unless they bring back Linux support.

As a Windows user who gradually shifted his apps over to cross-platform ones that would allow me to switch to Linux with minimal applications-related pain, this news saddens me. Having used Linux for almost a year as my main home machine, it was nice to see Songbird continuing to mature on my new platform of choice, Linux.

As others have pointed out, Linux seems to have as much usage as MacOS, though perhaps you don’t want to pay for the Linux specific development or testing anymore. That’s a pity. I wish the community would step up but I’m doubtful – I don’t know that Songbird ever reached a critical mass as a project given so many other Linux specific music players already exist.

I really like the Songbird interface. The fact that it used gekko made it extensible using CSS/HTML/javascript and it was really cool that the plugins were cross-platform. What I have still is usable but it’s a shame that it probably won’t get any significant updates anymore and I’ll eventually migrate to something else. I’ll miss it.

Good luck on the other platforms, but I can’t help but think that the cross-platform compatibility (Windows/Mac/Linux – same as Firefox) is what first drew me to Songbird. Without that, I’m not sure how much community support (from both end-users and developers) you will be losing. In any case, no hard feelings – thanks for all the open source support to this point (and, as you said, the code is still open) – best of luck in the future.

These stats are completely irrelevant, 3days? visits to getsongbird? cmon… anyone using linux will NOT be downloading from the main website but instead will download from some package manager (or even getdeb for ubuntu systems..) static binaries are the last resort for installing applications

The facts are that you should support linux and windows, they have Itunes in Mac.

Very bad news!
Songbird was my favourite player under ubuntu.
now i look for another player.

sad, i’ve recommend songbird to many windows user…

A big part of the ideology linux represents is about the community. People from the linux community contributed to Songbird and now you drop support to linux because of a business decision, way to go. This decision, more than hurting Songbird, it hurts open source itself.

A big part of the ideology linux represents has to do with community.
People from the linux community contributed to the project and you
decide to drop linux support because of a business decision. This
decision, more than hurting the project hurts open source itself.

By the way, I share the opinion of many people in here, Songbird’s
#1 feature is the fact that it is cross-platform, is it really worth to lose
that? I hope you reconsider this…

I used to argument for Songbird and use it every day because it gave me the possibility to have the same audio application on all the platforms I have to run. I even was about to introduce Songbird to a audience of some 30 fellow sysadmins in a presentation held by me during a seminar at the end of this month – because of the Multi-Platform / OSS feature. Now I can’t and won’t do this – in fact I will cease to use Songbird on Linux & Windows :

If I can’t use it on both systems I won’t use it on either!

Bye and thanks for all the fish.

P.S. Don’t you realize yourself by now, that you are shooting your own leg by estranging your most fervent supporters / co-developers / bug-trackers?

Bye bye SongBird !

I’m an Ubuntu fan. Actually I didn’t know Songbird before reading this announcement in a RSS feed, so I decided to give it a try… I found it fantastic. I’m very sad to know they’ll drop linux support an I can’t understand why they don’t DROP MAC SUPPORT INSTEAD: if look at the shares at the top of this page you can see that 10.8% of Songbird users have a Mac while 10.9% use Linux!!

That’s rather shame. And you gotta stop lying about us as well behind Phillips deals.

You realize those 1% linux users did 9% of bug report contributions while those 93% of windows users did 77% bug report contributions?

With some basic maths, you would find us Linux users did about 11 times more productive on error report and other stuffs compared to such large windows user base.

But whatever, what do I expect to a player which even can’t do very basic stuffs? For example, when will you ever fix a bug that songbird simply does not support embedded art on flac files? After submitted a bug report, I realized this bug was reported as early as 2008.

For two years, you guys have not even fixed very basic feature that all multimedia player should properly handle. May I start other “basic” features that just not work properly on WINDOWS version of this software?

I am not surprised, sadden or angered anyway, since even Windows version, which is main platform for Songbird, is barely usable and resource hog, what can we expect from ANY other platforms, let alone Linux?

Well, have fun try competing iTunes on Mac (you really need some incredible lucks for that) and thrive on Windows. Sadly, even Windows Media player 12 is clearly superior to Songbird, and not many free/commercial products are worse than standard MS consumer softwares. Hey, even this WMP 12 can be a wonderful software for playing ogg and flac files with right pieces of add-ons.

Well, if cutting off linux helps for getting more funds to Windows, please fix the basic features first.

By the way I am a Windows user, and there is little reason to choose this software since there are already much better alternatives in both free and commercial -Foobar2000 for free, Winamp and its variants (such as MediaMonkey) for commercial.

I am shocked and stunned at this decision! Now I will be looking not only for an alternative to Songbird but and alternative to Firefox!

how you can kill the linux-support? you are bad people.

Exaile, here we come

if it’s a problem having songbird 32 bit and songbird 64 bit for linux drop the 64 bit support.

And we see that the linux user is more than mac…

I’m working on moving from Windows to Linux – if Songbird doesn’t run on Linux, I’ll have to move to another application, as I need something that I can use on both platforms

Bad & Sad…

see

http://amarok.kde.org/
http://banshee-project.org/
http://projects.gnome.org/rhythmbox/screenshots.html
http://www.exaile.org/

or maybe… a fork of SongBird?

goodbye songbird

Bon débarras !
y en a plein d’alternatives, dieu merci !

This is a really sad day for me and for the linux community. I thought the Songbird crew shared the values of the Mozilla foundation, who always made a pride of keeping their Linux version at par with the other versions of their software. This is clearly a lack of vision by the Songbird crew. From what I see, you have more active users on Linux than on Mac OSX, so why are you keeping the Mac version of Songbird?

@darkscot…Don’t bash Mozilla. They had nothing to with this. Songbird uses their source code because it is open source, but Mozilla have no influence over the decisions of PoTI. I have seen this type of backlash against Mozilla in other forums as well, but it is not warranted. They have always provided full support to Linux and given us the full-featured browser with no feature-lag unlike Songbird. Please don’t let PoTI’s abandonment of the Open Source community drag Mozilla’s name through the mud.

I cannot understand, why songbird for Linux will be discontinued. VERY BAD IDEA…

I really love Songbird, and use it on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. This is very disappointing! Please think about this Twice!

I’m sure, many people will remove their songbird installations from their Macs and PCs, when they can’t use it on Linux anymore.

Keep on with the really good work, BUT PLEASE SUPPORT LINUX.

@sad day…Good point. I rarely visited GetSongbird.com or downloaded the binaries. I always installed and updated Songbird through GetDeb.net.

I have to agree with Darryl. I will no longer be using Songbird on any system ever again. A fork has been started called Nightengale which will support all of the above. So long songbird development team.

P.s.: I donated every year _BECAUSE_ Songbird supported all platforms equally.

I like(d) songbird but (fortunately) i don’t need songbird:

* amarok
* banshee
* exaile
* firefox plugins

Dropping Linux support is unfair, in my opinion.

If you are enjoying the benefits of an open source infrastructure that the developers of the core Mozilla provide for you, you should feel morally obliged to contribute to the open source ecosystem by keeping your software usable.

Kai

I have to agree with all of the other posts…I have followed the Songbird project since its infancy and even when you guys turned “corporate” I still held on but this is the last straw. This is the nail in the coffin as far as I’m concerned. So I’m no longer following Songbird, and your feed has been deleted from my Reader account.

So thanks guys for the good times together using songbird. Guess I’ll keep running the current version for a while and then switch back to mpd.

Your own update indicating a number of people who could not keep a civil tongue amongst the no-doubt thousands of complaints you have received just reflects the level of anger and stupification that your short-sighted decision has provoked. No matter: there are plenty of alternatives on Linux, and, as others have pointed out, much BETTER alternatives on Windows and Macs. The big thing you once had going for you was cross-platform, but now you’ve cut off your own feet – so SB will die fairly soon – a pitty, but you’ve lost the plot guys!

I’ve read the comments and waited to post my thoughts. Since you are cutting off comments(stupid move) I’ll make it short and sweet…

I’ve been a songbird fan since it’s birth. I’ve used it on Windows, Macs and Linux. I sat through Laura’s posts on this blog… She was more interested in what was for lunch than giving us in the flock any real updates. Once stevel started giving us some updates I had renewed hope. Only to see you start cutting back features in the Linux version. I asked repeatedly about the so called “road map” never once getting a response to my post. Now I see Aus’s response and the sheer arrogance he has for this community. Did you think that everyone would be OK with your decision? Did you think we would be happy about it?

When I read the other day that you were dropping support I was stunned. I just couldn’t believe that you would drop support without even asking for additional help. I’ve been reading all these post above and see a recurring theme. You have let a passionate fan base not only down but now are cutting off any dialogue. Is that how you really want to be remembered? You claim that you support open source but you actions indicate other wise. Who ever is handling your PR should be fired! You have dug your own grave and must sleep in it.

Like many others here I hope you have a change of heart and return to the support of the Linux version.
It’s the right thing to do!

Okay, now I’m using Rhythmbox and it’s pretty good. That said, newbie the GNU/Linux users truly lose something: the best way to prepare a switch is to start with crossplatform apps on Windows machines: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, LimeWire, Pidgin, VLC, The GIMP and so on but sadly Songbird is not part of that list anymore — although aTunes and Jajuk may be interesting crossplatform, free software replacements that I’ll be testing and advising from now on if they’re OK.

…but come on, it would be so much better if you folks reconsider your position and continue to support GNU/Linux (note that Mandriva 2010 beta 1 just updated Songbird to version 1.4.3…) See if you can’t sponsor a community driven version, make a call for donations and volunteer devs, there’s certainly something better to do than dropping GNU/Linux abruptly. What can we do to help you continue to support that OS? Give me a chance to forget my rm -r Songbird and reinstall the bird.

I would not recommend Banshee as a replacement for Songbird, coz’ Banshee relies on Mono, which is running very slowly actually. The most interesting and lasting solutions would be to help Rhythmbox, Amarok, Exaile (and so on) reaching a higher standard, even if they’re already quite good and definitely less buggy than Songbird.

[root@localhost ~]# urpme songbird

it’s easy

Visits to getsongbird.com 15% for Linux. I say that it should not be based on those stats. Many Linux users apt-get, emerge, and other ways to acquire the software.

I am guessing Microsoft threw some cash their way to lose the Linux user base.

Companies focusing on Windows (and Mac) don’t help Linux to get more users. People which keep using Linux just get “not as good” softwares. This contributes the cliches “Linux miss this app killer” and “on Linux you always have to hack something to get it working”.

For those who don’t know what a “unit test suite” is: this is a set of small robots which test if software works as expected. Of course, these “robots” are made by humans, and can not test all the possibilities (otherwise, you would have never heard of “bugs” !). So, automated testing on Linux does not mean it works as well as on other platforms, sadly.

When a company needs money, it focus on developing amazing features (“iPad support, omg this is awesome”) for user majority (often Windows). Working for 10% of users or writing unit tests means loosing money – at first ?

I feel if the Songbird Team truly had placed open source software as a priority above revenue, this ideological shift wouldn’t have occurred–which is what this is really about. The development of Linux and other GNU-licensed software might be FUELED by capital, but not MOTIVATED by it. Unfortunately, what we have here is yet another illustration of weak individuals giving Capitalism the go-ahead to kick ethics and moral standard out of the driver’s seat. Only God knows why I’ve put up with these horrendous loading times for so long.

check http://getnightingale.org/

Hmm. sad. I really think you should drop the other two, whos users have so many options, and devote development to linux. And why drop linux but keep the Macs?

Oh well good luck. You’ll need it.

this is a bad decision. windows has a ton music apps already and mac has itunes. linux doesn’t really have a front runner for a music app. songbird could have been it though.

I am part of those 10.9%… and used Songbird since the first versions running in Linux AMD64.

I was happy with every new release because you could see major improvements and for me the functionality was sufficient

I will also be part of those of ban Songbird from their hard drives… it is a pitty, however: http://getnightingale.org

Well, this is it. I was using Songbird mostly because of the cross-platform capability. Now, I will switch back to Amarok in Linux and Winamp in Windows.

Thanks for the effort and good luck in windows. I think you will need it. I can’t see why someone would use Songbird in windows over all the other great players now that it’s not cross-platform…

How exactly does having a Linux build make Songbird money?

Does it cost more money to support Linux than it makes the customer?

If Linux users don’t make them money, and they cost more to support… why would Songbird bother?

why not drop the mac version than instead of linux?

The most attractive aspects of Songbird were its open source nature, tri-platform support, and its iPod plugin. Sadly, two of these options are now gone.

I’ve already abandoned Songbird on Windows in favor of a proprietary (but freeware) application. Looks like I’ll have to find a replacement on Linux. Too bad I won’t be able to run the same application across platforms. My only hope is that a cross-platform fork emerges.

btw – the Mac version won’t be dumped because POTI will be pushing to have SB bundled with media players. Having a Mac version gives users of the other commercial/consumer OS an option when purchasing a non-iPod player.