Our conclusion: Spotify is using DRM to prevent things legally permitted even by overly strict US copyright law, making Spotify defective by design.

Before you flame me, I’ll admit that if you really know and love iTunes (and maybe are tied to the iTunes store) then perhaps iTunes isn’t totally a waste of time. However, for me it is complete garbage. Allow me to tell you a little story.

Spotify yesterday released a preview version of its peer-to-peer (P2P) music application for desktop Linux, packaged as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04. The software shares most of the features of the Windows and Mac OS X versions of Spotify, but requires Spotify Premium membership.

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.

Songbird is like an open source version of iTunes that handles just about everything that program does, while swapping out the iTunes store interface in favor of the world's music blogs.

Apple will tell you that iTunes 8.2.1 fixes bugs and, in particular, improves interoperability with iPhones and iPod Touches running iPhone 3.0 Software. But, it really it only has one "feature:" It blocks the Palm Pre's iTunes compatibility. KDE thinks there's another way.

To be sure, the alternatives don’t have Apple's muscle with the media industry. This translates into a lack of a movie/TV download service to be seriously competitive with the likes of what iTunes can provide. Despite this drawback, there are still some great open source alternatives to iTunes for those who are more interested in software freedom than software convenience.

Preluded by the discomforting subject line “Microsoft infiltrating into open source world,” we have just received a headsup from an anonymous reader.

Andy Updegrove writes an article providing an overview of the history of FOSS and its champions, the major philosophical differences that divide FOSS from OSS developers, the multiple licenses under which FOSS is made available, and the principle non-profit institutions that support and promote FOSS.