Songbird, the popular open source media player has announced that it will halt its support for Linux. Currently the Songbird team is working fervently to meet their next release, NOFX, release date scheduled April 26th. It seems that Songbird’s small team has too much on its plate and came to this disheartening decision:
After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird. Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache. We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices
While I don’t really use Songbird, I know that its a solid product that many users have come to depend on. My initial knee jerk reaction was anger, but soon realized that Songbird has supported Linux for 4 years (since day one.) They wouldn’t give up on Linux unless they were really stretched out too thin.
The more important question here is: how can we fix this? Would an influx of volunteering coders bring Songbird back to life on our favorite OS? Would liberating the development team to allow more willing coders to contribute do the trick? How about forking it?
The Songbird team has put so much effort over the years, and I am sure it was a very hard decision. I would very much like to hear from them on how the community at large could help.
Via [leftyb]