"OSLO, Norway (AP) — Norway's top consumer advocate said Monday he is taking Apple Inc. to the government's Market Council in a test case seeking to force the American company to open its iTunes music store to digital players other than its own iPod..."

"Moments ago Apple announced that Windows users can now download and run their popular Safari web browser. That's right, more Apple software on Windows boxes. Safari is a pretty cool browser, and I do use it on my MacBook Pro. But where's my Safari for Linux? Why wasn't today's announcement about open sourcing Safari?"

"...We must continue to put pressure on Apple. That means continuing to boycott all DRM-content on iTunes, including the iPhone and the App Store. We encourage Apple to continue to remove DRM from iTunes content, including all movies, TV shows, games, audiobooks and applications, as well as support for free formats, such as Vorbis and Theora..."

Apple has always been very protective over their proprietary software. The company doesn't want anything but iTunes to control an iPod - and for good reason, too.

We all love the iPod, but sadly, Apple is still not kind enough to provide an iPod manager for those of us who use Linux. However, this is not really a big issue nowadays as there are other means to manage your iPod under Linux. Thanks to these excellent free and open source media players that are certified to handle your iPod the way iTunes can.

Apple's attempt to quash an effort to help the latest iPods and iPhones work with non-Apple software such as the Linux operating system is out of line, the Electronic Frontier Foundation said Tuesday.

A lot has been said of late concerning the way Apple slipped in a brand-new Safari installer into the Apple Software Update used by many hundreds of thousands of iPod-wielding Windows users. Let me offer a new perspective, from the open source point of view - why what Apple did was bad, and why open source developers wouldn’t do it.

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users -- whether it was previously installed or not -- via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just "wrong."

Songbird is like an open source version of iTunes that handles just about everything that program does, while swapping out the iTunes store interface in favor of the world's music blogs.