Songbird now in convenient Philips hardware form

This is a win-win.

Open source projects like Songbird often have a hard time being noticed by the general market, but now it will have the power of Philips behind it. Philips also has a business model that Songbird can take advantage of, not just in the hardware but through its existing site.

Philips, meanwhile, gets an excellent player that is far more competitive with iTunes than anything it previously offered.

This is the way open source is supposed to work. It's supposed to connect with the market. If you don't want your hands stained with filthy lucre you're FOSS, not open source.

Songbird recently released Version 1.4.3 of its software. The new version has a warning against using it with Windows 7, but Stephen Lau writes that's just a "caveat emptor" thing, that he knows of many users already running Songbird on Windows 7.

In the same post he notes that Songbird is no longer maintaining an iPod Extension, preferring to go with an import-export syncing function instead. "Playing an unsupported game of catchup with Apple sucked," he writes.

On the Philips side, support is being rolled out slowly. Some new GoGear players will include Songbird inside. Others will have a support CD provided.