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A true revolution was unleashed when the official blog of Songbird for example, reported that the player no longer support GNU / Linux.

74 trackback and 589 Comments say a lot about the satisfaction of users from the open source for this strategic choice. Virtually all of the comments come from users of the player with GNU / Linux, who do not let themselves be fooled by the almost triumphant tone of the post: “Songbird sings a new tune” associated with the image of the mascot “Songbird” happy that he sings and if the sounds, I put the same article.

The decisione (in the post is not described) is given by the new partnership con Philips, develop parallel versions only for Windows and Mac.

In the post also reassure developers that the license will still be open source, the project will be always available, simply will no longer be tested on Linux. This decision is in part justified by the tables showing the percentages of use player on the various operating systems.

	Windows	Mac Intel	Linux 32	Linux 64	Others
Active Users	78.2%	10.8%	7.7%	3.2%	0.1%

	Windows	Mac	Linux	Others
Users who reported bugs	77%	14%	9%	–
Members who contributed add-on	74%	17%	9%	–
Users who translated	72%	3%	25%	–
Visits to the site	73%	11%	15%	1%
Share usage by operating system	91.3%	5.9%	1%	1.8%

To begin with 7,7% (32bit Linux users) + 3,9% (64bit Linux users) ago 10,9%, percentage slightly higher than that of Mac users (10,8%). At most it justified the cessation of support for Mac users (it would?). We must take it as a novelty that Windows users are more compared to Linux users?

In the second table shows the percentage of contribution. Also in this case they are percentages taken the total number of users. If you hold 100 developers whose 10 use Linux, 10 use Mac and 80 use Windows it is obvious that I will have more contributions on the Windows. It would have been enough to do a count on contributions in relative terms. From 100% Linux users (10,9% of the total) what percentage contributed?

The statistics yield results that can not be read-thumb, must evaluate them concretely.

The good news is that the project was taken up by Nightingale, a small group of developers who are being established with the aim of create new build from source code Songbird and make them available to users Linux. The bad news is that they are still at the beginning of the work that promises to be difficult at the start.

A real shame to speak in these terms of software helpful and performance (especially in ultime release). With Songbird was easy synchronize mp3, log in to iTunes (in fact it is one of the few alternatives to iTunes for Linux), listen to radio online in streaming e download music legally.