codercotton

Many people have chided Apple for not porting it’s popular music software to Linux. Yesterday, in his blog post responding to Steve Jobs’ stance on DRM, Linspire Founder Michael Robertson offers a suggestion - let Linspire port iTunes to Linux.

4) Make iTunes software for Linux.

I talked to you a few years ago about making iTunes work on Linux. Apple made the leap to Microsoft Windows by releasing iTunes for that platform. Porting iTunes to Linux would be a relatively easy job and give people more flexibility in their choice of operating system. A Linux company I founded called Linspire would even do the engineering for free if engineering resources were an issue.

This would be great, one of the biggest reasons I don’t spend more time booted into Linux is the lack of being able to share my music library with my OS X installation.

I really doubt that Apple would follow this route - I believe they’d want to do all the engineering in-house. It shouldn’t be that hard though. Google has already ported their Earth and Picasa applications to Linux using the WINE frameworks, and they actually work pretty well. The open-source project also benefited from bug fixes Google submitted. I can see Apple, with their open-source ties, taking this same route to develop a Linux iTunes.

And if for some reason they actually do allow Linspire to do the engineering, I’m sure Linspire would utilize WINE as well.

-Cotton