In a surprise announcement, the Songbird developers have announced that they will no longer support Songbird in Linux. This is really a socking announcement as Songbird has its root in open source. Songbird will however continue to be available for Windows and Mac.

UPDATE: Now, long term Songbird contributor, Antoine, has finally announced that they are forking the  Linux version of the Songbird project and the new music player will be called Nightingale.

For those who do not know what Songbird is - it is a cross-platform Music Player cum Manager. Some time back we had also told you about 15 add-ons that can improve your Songbird Experience. (15 more add-ons)

The decision to stop support for Songbird in Linux is because of the lack of engineers in the Songbird team. Due to the limited amount of man-power available with the Songbird Team, the Linux build has been lagging behind the others. According to Georges Auberger, they have to come up with a trade off between continuing development for Linux or bringing in new features. The Songbird team has decided to go with the latter and stop the Linux support.

This is what Georges Auberger wrote:

After careful consideration, we’ve come to the painful conclusion that we should discontinue support for the Linux version of Songbird. Some of you may wonder how a company with deep roots in Open Source could drop Linux and we want you to know it isn’t without heartache. We have a small engineering team here at Songbird, and, more than ever, must stay very focused on a narrow set of priorities. Trying to deliver a raft of new features around all media types, and across a growing list of devices, we had to make some tough choices.

Songbird will however maintain a version of the software for use by their engineers who develop on the Linux platform. This version will be available to the Linux community and they will keep Linux build bots and host the Linux builds on the developer wiki. However, these builds will not be tested for stability and and will not necessarily pick up new features developed by Songbird’s team.