A Firefox for music?

Spinner

If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn't have done much better than to compare Apple'a iTunes software to Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. Lord's new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called "Songbird," based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.

Apple's iTunes is "like Internet Explorer, if Internet Explorer could only browse Microsoft.com," Lord said. "We love Apple, and appreciate and thank them for setting the bar in terms of user experience. But it's inevitable that the market architecture changes as it matures."
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It is undeniable that music software and services are moving increasingly off the hard drive and onto the Web. But if Songbird is to be the "Firefox of MP3" when it's done, it has a long way to go.

Source: News.com