Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
> Amarok 2 on windows - A rant
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | It would most likely take a lot of effort to keep someone else from
> | porting it to windows if we do not, and this kind of artificial
> | scarcity is not what free software is about.
> `----
>
> http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/429-Amarok-2-on-windows-A-rant.html
There's valid arguments on both sides. On the one hand - yes, if Windows
users are accustomed to using many FOSS apps, then their transition to
Linux will be much smoother (and more likely), but OTOH they might also
lose the motivation to switch at all (apathy). It's touch and go what
the actual outcome would be.
I've had very direct dealings with the Amarok team (including Monroe),
and I have to say that my concerns about them have not entirely been
allayed. Monroe issued the equivalent of a takedown notice against the
Fedora maintainer of the Amarok package, essentially because our version
linked against GStreamer, and Monroe didn't like that fact. I went
berserk and read Monroe the Riot Act (or more specifically the GPL), and
a predictable flame war ensued. Of course there's more to it, and the
whole confused issue revolved around patents, code quality, reputations,
a communication breakdown, 64bit issues, and more than one bad decision
in Fedora QA and repo admin, but the initial result was a bloody mess
and resulted in a small war between me and Amarok. The issue was
resolved eventually, but not before there was considerable damage done
(a nightmare of broken deps which essentially broke the Extras tree).
Despite the successful resolution to this problem, the events which lead
to it gave me the distinct impression that Monroe does not exactly "get"
the full spirit of the GPL, and much like Torvalds or Schilling,
something tells me that Monroe probably regrets going the Free Software
route, and fundamentally prefers the proprietary model. I can actually
see the Windows version resulting in a dual license fork of a commercial
shareware version, and possibly even some licensing deal with Apple and
Microsoft for "official" codec support. Monroe definitely seems to have
that mindset.
So overall, no I'm not very happy about the impending Windows port, but
given the attitude of the Amarok devs I think it was inevitable.
We'll see how things work out, but I'm not optimistic.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| "People are not happy in stinking hellholes of abject poverty, what
| is true is that once you cross subsistence ... additional increases
| in wealth have virtually no effect on well-being ... This is worth
| knowing in case you have a choice between "X" and making more
| money, almost certainly "X" is what you should choose."
| - Barry Schwartz
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Fedora release 7 (Moonshine) on sky, running kernel 2.6.21-1.3194.fc7
08:31:38 up 18 days, 20:17, 4 users, load average: 2.65, 1.86, 1.62
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