Quote:
How about paying someone the money to create a new open source player.
I don't think we would be able to come up with enough money to get it done. Assuming we all feel really generous and can scrape together $20k that is still only two or three months of a good programmers time. The current player software has many man years of development put into it. Even the time Mark has put into hijack is small change compared to what it would take to rewrite the player from scratch and just get it to the current level of functionality.
The only way I could see a replacement player happening is to turn it into a community project with lots of us working on it in our spare time. But unfortunately every time someone has tried to get something like that started there seems to have been very little interest.
Paying someone like Rob S to rework the current code base into something more modular with published interfaces so individual components could be replaced with open source pieces over time might be a better path. But, that would still likely be a significant investment and when he was finished we would have something that was likely more buggy than what we started with. The benefits of modularizing everything wouldn't be evident until enough people here started enhancing or replacing individual components.
-Mike
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