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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of thing I would love to do to my music player of choice, Musicbee.

You know, if it was open source! :(

The creator barely touches it anymore, and it's completely free and always has been so I do not understand why it isn't open source.

There are so many little nagging issues, little bits and bobs that are broken or slow or just weird that I would absolutely love fixing up in my spare time.

And no, transitioning at this point to something else like FooBar would be way too much work. And I tried HQPlayer, its UI/UX is too terrible for me to let it slide.

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> Reply #19 from Steven on: May 23, 2013, 03:28:39 PM

> As i have stated several times i have no near term plans to open source MusicBee. When i feel i dont want to keep the project going then making the source code available will be one of the options i would consider. This is just a hobby project done because i enjoy programming and will never be something done in a professional manner. I spend enough time managing people in my day job and dont want to have to do that with this!

> I really have no idea why this should be a surprise as i have never pretended otherwise.

> Anyone who has concerns around this (including me "being run over by a bus") really should look elsewhere and use another app so your concerns are addressed.

> Here's a link to help you out:

> http://alternativeto.net/software/musicbee/

https://web.archive.org/web/20170721042120/https://getmusicb...

> I do not understand why it isn't open source.

Because your software project then becomes a people management project.

You can have open source without open contributions, eg NetHack and (I think) Sqlite

SQLite has other contributors, just a very curated list of who can contribute.

https://sqlite.org/src/reports

The curated list can be zero. You can just dump source code onto the net and then ignore everybody who messages you about it. This is perfectly valid in open source.

I have many open source things that are essentially me looking at the PR queue once every 3 months. I don’t think thats anywhere close to people management.

There’s nothing about open source code that requires you to do anything at all with it.

It doesn't have to be. Just say you're not accepting PRs. Let people fork and develop their own implementations.

Yep, the SQLite way.

And if you really like something about someone else's fork, you can even upstream stuff from it yourself (which, for clarity, SQLite won't do, but you can).

> Let people fork and develop their own implementations

Then a fork gets made and if they improve it massively then half your users end up using it and the other half ends up bugging you to add the improvements into your version and it's no longer your project.

I mean I agree too it should be open source if the dev doesn't really update it anymore but I can also completely see why they wouldn't want to do that.

In that case the person would be a bottleneck towards improving a piece of software that would benefit a lot of people. Sure, you're within your right to do that, but really?

Writing the code for a open source project demands a lot more perfection than people realize. It is a lot more work than getting a programm just to work nicely.

Up to a point, I agree. For larger changes, it would require community outreach, internal communication with other devs, testing, feedback, etc.

But there are also a lot of small "easy wins" that require none of that to be a good addition to the code.

Here's an alternative: Rewrite the whole thing as open source.

I actually thought about something like this as both a way to try coding with AI help and to learn some mobile dev. I'm not happy with the default music player on iOS, nor with the one I'm using. I'm only guessing that using ChatGPT and/or CoPilot I could at least get something started pretty quick.

Step 1: A mobile app plays a music file

Step 2: Play, Pause, FF, Rew

Step 3: A list of songs to select from

Step 4: Show album cover

..etc..

Musicbee is the only piece of software that I consistently missed when I stopped using windows.

If it was maintained I might consider using wine for it but as it is I completely gave up on the idea of a music manager, I just use mpv to play whatever album I listen to (and I always listen to albums, get out of here with your playlists).

Did you try contacting him? Without bullying him about GitHub or anything, just try to persuade him to let you look at the code.

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