If digital-music veteran Rob Lord wanted to court controversy with his new open-source start-up, he probably couldn"t have done much better than to compare Apple Computer"s iTunes software to Microsoft"s Internet Explorer Web browser.
Lord"s new five-person company, the ambitiously named Pioneers of the Inevitable, is building a piece of digital-music software called "Songbird," based on much of the same underlying open-source technology as the Firefox Web browser.
With their first technical preview expected early next year, the programmers want to create music-playing software that will work naturally with the growing number of music sites and services on the Web, instead of being focused on songs on a computer"s hard drive. That"s where iTunes, which plugs only into Apple"s own music store, falls short, Lord argues.