The source is open, if don't want to contribute, don't. Just because something doesn't fit a specific definition it doesn't mean it's not worth of existence.
It's one thing to provide a source available codebase. That's a choice, and it's fine for various definitions of fine. What they did was legally put themselves in hot water with the inclusion of proprietary dependencies, misrepresent what their intentions were, and likely irrevocably damage their reputation to a small, but vocal minority, who likely have a sizeable overlap with folks that know what Winamp is/was.
It's okay if none of that matters to you, or if it doesn't resonate with you, but the things that were done were comically awful in terms of sharing a codebase.
> "Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1," you may not "distribute modified versions of the software" in source or binary, and "only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications." Anyone may contribute, in other words, but only to Winamp's benefit.
They were basically grifters. It wasn't just a dump for preservation sake (which would be fine as a historical artifact), they wanted to benefit. Parasitic. What was the community benefitting? They could volunteer for free to benefit a for-profit company when there are already open-source clones that do the same thing? (XMMS and it's various descendents for starters).
Of course they didn't know what they were doing. It was written by a 19-year-old in the mid 90s. The code is messy with poor licensing and some build tools were included in the repository and they wrote a dumb license for it? Who cares, they shipped a product that 10s of millions of people used and loved and wanted to share that code up to the world and instead of embracing the best of what they were trying to do while helping them to make things better, the community piled on them until they said it was so not worth it that just pulled the whole thing.
Bravo and job well done.
Oh no! I did notice all the hallmonitors calling for teacher.
I absolutely support dumping proprietary code on any platform and I'm glad I got a copy the day it was uploaded which lets me verify any fork claiming to be from it.
That's a disingenuous argument. It doesn't meet the OSI's definition of open.
> the community piled on them until they said it was so not worth it that just pulled the whole thing.
Yes, but let's be honest: If it wasn't the community, it would have been DMCA takedown requests from the companies whose software was published in the repo. At best, the community hastened the end of the repo by a few weeks.
Other license holders who would at best DMCA Github and take it down anyway. And at worst sue WinAnp for infringement? This is really bad for them. But if you only care about getting to use a decent product, I guess you don't have to care.
This stuff makes FOSS look bad tho. And would only discourage others from trying to make their source available. So I and others care when thinking of the forest instead of the beautiful tree.
The "they" that made that license is not the "they" that originally wrote it.
The most recent "they" is a European corporation. "They" are the ones trying to use open source as free labor. This isn't the case of "some dumb kid who didn't understand licensing", this is the case of a large international corporation trying to exploit the public for free labor. That's it.
The "they" who originally wrote Winamp, Justin Frankel among others, understands licensing well enough to know when to use GPL and when to keep it closed as he has projects in both areas.
Of course a lot of us have a soft spot for Winamp. It was a formative part of internet culture in the late 90s and early 00s. That and Napster was kind of the first step to things like iTunes and Spotify. But let's be honest here. What the Llama Group did was hilariously inept in the best case and ineptly exploitative in the worst.
>They ended up looking bad and exposing themselves to legal trouble, but I'm not sure this was awful
For a company, I can't think of anything less awful than purposefully choosing to expose oneself to legal trouble. I'd say that qualifies as "comically awful".
>they might even have known exactly what they were doing.
In what way? Are they going bankrupt (so nothing to sue for) and just want to send out readable source on the way out, without enough care to strip out copyright and list dependencies? That's certainly a hail Mary, but I think that move does more damage to the community than goodwill.
If we break the contracts we just end up with less free information. I want to protect the long term.
Bravo indeed, it's important these things get done so that people can be better educated on software licenses and open source. If we want to discourage stealing, we have to tell people stealing is bad.
We do absolutely nobody any favors by carving out exceptions for whatever darling piece of software we love.
Anyone can read about this here: https://opensource.org/history
But it's well-documented elsewhere, too.
The term 'open-source' is political, as much as it aimed to 'depoliticize' free software. Its definition is and always has been normative rather than merely descriptive. The term and concept exist to serve a movement, and anyone who is invested in that movement's goals is likely to be invested in promoting a historically informed understanding of both.
As for why you, specifically should care about the concept, I think I don't have the patience to make the case right now. But if you're genuinely interested in that question, I'd be happy to provide links to resources if you let me know what sorts of media you enjoy/have energy for.
You got to look at the code. Because it was open.
It's the most literal definition of "open source". You're complaining because you can't also do whatever you want with it. So now we're back to the code being closed again. Better now?