Quote:
An open source player cannot be EOL'd. Rio cannot halt development or distribution of an open source player. We would then own the hardware, the kernel, the player and all 3rd party applications. The real thing may not have a future, and our money will have been wasted.

True, and I would like very much to have an open source player, but I don't know how to counter two Rob's arguments: scope of the task (juged both by the amount of effort put into existing player by a very competent bunch of guys@empeg and by 'inventorying' its features) and the fact that all nice add-ons we have have been single-developer efforts (I think that only Hijack got some patches by somebody other than 'lead developer'). We simply don't have very good 'bazaar' development track record

OTOH, perhaps having a promising open source player 'skeleton' commisioned by the community and started by somebody like Rob S would energize our collective development spirit. I don't know. In the meantime, I am willing to subscribe to the bug fix effort, even if the result will not be spectacularly better than 2 final.