Sci-Ence! Justice Leak!

(Or at least I think it’s Free Software… I can’t find the license, but the code is freely available, and it’s based on and linked from Despotify, which is BSD licensed…)

Someone has ported despotify (the BSD-licensed clone of Spotify) to Java, and added a rough GUI, which makes it usable for casual users. It’s already far better than despotify – good enough that I may try seeing about using it at work, where I can’t use spotify because we’re not allowed to use WINE – though it’s still missing a few essential features. For the moment you can’t access playlists (your own or anyone else’s) but you can search for and play tracks/albums.

Once it gets the playlist feature (which I imagine will be coming very soon) so I can use it to create my playlists here, I’ll be switching to using it full-time and ditching the official client, but in the meantime it’ll do for those of you who want to get around the geographic restrictions Spotify impose (though this client only supports paid accounts) or who are even stricter about Free Software than I am (and I’m fairly strict – I even use the linux-libre kernel – but I use spotify, the non-free version of rar to read cbr fils, and Inform 7, which is in the process of being freed).

Jotify can be downloaded from here.

ETA The developer has got back to me to say the program is under the BSD license and a file to that effect will be added in the next release.