Apple's attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday.

So, Apple now blocks third-party software from accessing iPods. But is behaviour like that news? No, unfortunately not at all.

I've owned a lot of iPods. My wife has owned a lot of iPods. Not anymore...All of a sudden, Apple is trying everything they can to prohibit interopability.

"OSLO, Norway (AP) — Norway's top consumer advocate said Monday he is taking Apple Inc. to the government's Market Council in a test case seeking to force the American company to open its iTunes music store to digital players other than its own iPod..."

Banshee is a free media player for GNU / Linux, written in Mono and Gtk . It uses GStreamer multimedia library for encoding and decoding of different file types, such as Ogg Vorbis, MP3 and FLAC.

We all love the iPod, but sadly, Apple is still not kind enough to provide an iPod manager for those of us who use Linux. However, this is not really a big issue nowadays as there are other means to manage your iPod under Linux. Thanks to these excellent free and open source media players that are certified to handle your iPod the way iTunes can.

While it's true that Apple iTunes has some compelling services, such as their TV/music/movie store, the media player itself leaves many power users yearning for something more.

"...We must continue to put pressure on Apple. That means continuing to boycott all DRM-content on iTunes, including the iPhone and the App Store. We encourage Apple to continue to remove DRM from iTunes content, including all movies, TV shows, games, audiobooks and applications, as well as support for free formats, such as Vorbis and Theora..."

Over the years, iTunes has been accepted as a necessary evil between media players.
However, the open source project called Songbird, ever since its conception, has been providing some stiff competition for iTunes.