[gst-devel] amarok

[Benjamin Otte]

Quoting iain <iain at prettypeople.org>:

> although the mantra is "Choice is good", its pretty much a lie.
> 
I need to comment on that.
I want a competitor for GStreamer. Competitors are good for lots of things 
that open source projects without competitors often lack:
- dedication
vi only became the world's best text editor because it had a competitor.
- standards
You're pretty much free to do what you want and break compatibility where you 
want. See freedesktop.org, they actually write those things now.
- features
The best way to make someone include a feature is if the other one has it 
already. The best way to know that one shouldn't include it, is if the other 
one has it and <blink>it sucks!</blink>
- stagnation
Many projects stagnated after a while just because there was no pressure and 
it was no fun to hack on them. People would use that project anyway. I don't 
want to live without transparent movies, transparent desktops are enough 
already.
- different approaches
You can actually test different approaches to a problem in different toolkits. 
Even on a large scale. Witness the configuration differences is Gnome and KDE. 
You might make a lot of errors by chosing only One Way.


That said, while Xine and NMM definitely are a nice source of ideas and stuff 
not to do, I certainly don't want to beat them GStreamer anywhere. And it's 
good enough if the competitor is just a small one which is constantly dying. :)

Benjamin