Re: Common music database?

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Mon, Mar 13, 2006 at 11:19:16PM +0000, Iain * wrote:
> On 3/13/06, Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com> wrote:
> 
> > f) Must be portable, should be written in C; by portable I mean...
> > Windows, OS X, other Unixes.
> 
> While I'm not against it being deliberatly portable to Windows or OSX,
> can I ask why you think this is such an essential element?

I think it might encourage free software on windows, so those who are say 
making mono based gtk+ music players could still use the same backend.

> Is it really likely that we'll get the big 3 (itunes, windows media
> player,winamp) to use it and I don't actually know anyone who uses a
> different player on these systems (this is not a call for a flood of
> emails saying "my best friend's cousin's gran's dog's neighbour uses
> XYZPlayer" or similar anecdotal claims)

Not likely, but those products are products we want to replace with
free software anyways.  But those who we do replace, having a common
backend to encourage different flavours of players is a good thing.

> I just think that for thing that has limited scope to open source
> media players that run on unix, spending our time making it portable
> sounds like time that could be better spent on other things...if
> someone on Windows wants to port it (and contribute patches back) let
> them, but we've got finite resources here, so lets use them in the
> best possible way.

I agree that it's a lesser goal but we should keep it open so that
we can encourage replacements and perhaps we can get them to convert
to a real desktop. :-)  The pain of migration will be a lot less since
the same applications are available.

sri