Friday, February 10, 2006

Open-source challenge to iTunes goes live

Only a couple of days ago sister network, business-rant, was touting the first real challenger to the iPod - the Sony Ericsson Walkman phone that has sold more than 3 million devices since their launch only last August.

Now an open-source start-up, Songbird, has gone live with their answer to iTunes for the open-source community. It's based on Firefox and if Songbird it's anything like as successful as them - Apple had better watch out.

Songbird's vision is software that makes little distinction between songs that happen to be located on a local drive and music that is online. The player can also be used to tap into online music services such as RealNetworks Rhapsody or Yahoo's music subscription service.

It's designed as a universal music service on the Internet and stands in the opposite court to Apple's proprietary approach. At the least, Songbird is likely to force some competition on Apple which can only be a good thing. Look at what Firefox has done to speed up innovation at Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

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