Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them.

It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous.

It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.

And yes, they could have done better, sure. But instead of bringing in someone in the community you just chased them away. Well done everyone. Good job. Excellent result. A story to tell the grandchildren.

exactly.

The forking was bizarre and I agree with your take on it ("forking" with no other changes is not "distribution" except in the most obtuse way). But the licensing issues with what 3rd party software they threw in there was a pretty serious issue. It was probably inevitable they'd take it down and redo it even without the drama.

My thoughts exactly. It was shocking and appalling to me how people reacted to this effort. Instead of praising them for taking such a big step, the airwaves were saturated with people magnifying every little imperfection and shitting all over them for it.

If anyone is thinking about open sourcing (and/or making source available) their previously closed app, they had better be paying attention to this. The clear message I saw is that open sourcing is not worth it.

And that sucks and is the exact opposite of how it should be. Open sourcing is an amazing gift you can give to humanity, and instead of looking the gift horse in the mouth and bitching about some imperfections, we should have been praising them and thanking them for their generosity, and sending PRs to help fix issues.

The mess resulting from the Winamp open sourcing/source availabling is more on us (the community) than them, IMHO. If we had acted like rational adults instead of emotionally charged children dehumanizing strangers on the internet and shitting all over them, they would have fixed the issues and we'd be in a better place. Instead now, we have nothing. This is why we can't have nice things.

Agreed it probably was inevitable, but I would be surprised if the "redo" part even happens now. Why would it? They spent their time/money giving us a gift, and we mainly just mocked them because the gift had imperfections. I wouldn't blame them for adopting a "go f*k yourself" attitude.

To be honest I didn't see the license issues until this thread, because I had already checked out of the discussion by the time that was brought up.

And it would have been fine to say "hey, I think there may be a problem here, let's work together to see if we can solve it" wrt. to either their custom license or the GPL. That is not what happened. The sad thing is there would be many knowledgable patient people who would be willing to work with the WinAmp people on resolving all of this free-of-charge, but who is going to notice them in a sea of assholes?

I'll also argue it's not "serious", at least in the sense of "needs to be fixed ASAP". It's been like this for how long? 20 years? 25 years? It's just that no one noticed before. And it's basically a "dead" legacy project. Don't really need to rush to correct mistakes of the past here IMHO.

I saw a guy on youtube complaining about it. He seemed to talk about FLOSS a lot and focus on the strict definition of "open source."

I checked his github profile and he barely published anything.

So here we have a company that made all of the code of a complete application source available being dunked by a guy who barely published any source code at all.

Really put things in perspective for me.

The company broke a copyleft license though.

There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts to meet halfway between open participation and business interests. I think as far as defending against copycat risk, that's somewhat reasonable.

Many in the OSS community have made it clear that there's a distinction between "yes do whatever you want with it, including running a local instance and/or charging people for it while using the original name" and "we're transparent but want to reserve some intellectual property rights."

We'll see if most consumers of said software agree with the vocal proponents of OSS purity. I think the story of BUSL and similar licenses has yet to fully play out.

There's a lot of emotional weight behind every PR I do on Github. They're generally the result of dozens of hours of work, discussion with project developers, etc. After all that, it could still be rejected, or need to be reworked, and discussion tone might not carry well over text, etc.

When I see Twitter-style drama on Github, it makes me sick to my stomach thinking that one day I could be the target of an impromptu dogpile.

And if they didn't publish the code nobody would ever know about it, so what do you think the other companies will do?

Not breaking laws, because it can be eventually revealed one way or another? I only half joking.

There are some people you cannot help. They subscribe strongly to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. A few classic examples are:

- YC attempting to choose one startup to fund based on HN votes

- Winamp trying to open-source their code

- Jordan Henderson supporting the LGBTQ community

- Ellen Degeneres's sponsors offering to donate to a charity per question answered by her guests

- PETA offering to donate money for each person who chooses veganism

- Numerous open-source developers who give their things for free

It's important to know who your audience is. If they require unwavering purity, it's often better for your own sake to not engage with them. For my part, I stay clear of all these groups in a charitable sense. Everyone pays. The relationship is obvious. They'll go after the people who give them stuff for free. But for the ones who charge them it's just a transaction. That is good.

I don't agree with this take. First, licenses are what court cases and a system of laws are built on. You can't exactly fork a repo with a bad license and hope for the best. Second, this article is downplaying the fact that the repo included a lot of libraries whose licenses they were violating by including it in their repo, and there was no easy way to make the code work without those libraries. The poor license they wrote was just one of a myriad of issues. I think The Register's article is more accurately worded in this regard[0].

[0] = https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winam...

You think they should've just left the license-violating repo up for others to possibly also unknowingly violate?

> But instead of bringing in someone in the community you just chased them away.

As i remember, they were caught violating the GPL.

I'm sorry, i don't think that law applies only to some unfortunate people.

I’m not too familiar with this situation, but I think one thing that would help Open Source in general is a way to signal what level of user the thing is intended to target.

For instance, is this just something that’s being dumped out on the internet in case someone else finds it useful?

Is it part of your portfolio and intended to showcase your technical skill, but not necessarily be polished from a UX perspective?

Or is it intended to be useful for end users?

Maybe it would be good to have a visually distinct and consistent badge or checklist available for open source projects to communicate the high-level goals so that people’s expectations are set correctly and they know what kind of feedback is inappropriate.

Every project is going to nominally be as-is for obvious liability reasons.

- UX Tier 10 for completely tech-illiterate users

- UX Tier 9 for infrequent mainstream users (do not need to watch a tutorial)

- UX Tier 8 for frequent mainstream users (have watched tutorials)

- UX Tier 7 for power users (need to read the manual)

- UX Tier 6 for sysadmin users (responsible for keeping it running for above users)

- UX Tier 5 for domain specialist users (know the theory behind it)

- UX Tier 4 for developers (read the API reference)

- UX Tier 3 for domain specialist developers (API reference and know the theory)

- UX Tier 2 for project ecosystem developers (know conventions and idiomatic patterns)

- UX Tier 1 for the project team itself (know where the skeletons are buried)

- UX Tier 0 for no further development anticipated

Yeah, why not ? Violating from some people (closed source proponents) is fine. /s

> the vocal proponents of OSS purity

Hey, that's me! :-)

(the following is not targeted at you, but at the "Fair Source" idea. You are just the messenger here presenting the idea, I wouldn't shoot you. Although I do respectfully take issue with some phrasing of yours, which I take as an occasion to explain my rebuttal of the Fair Source idea:)

> There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts to meet halfway between open participation and business interests

Open source is not necessarily open participation. See for instance SQLite: open source, but not open participation.

Open source is also not at odds with business interests, given the right business model. See also SQLite, and the many successful commercial open source projects.

Open participation and business interests can also go hand in hand, but my comment is already too long to develop on this and I want to focus on the free software aspect.

I reject this idea that source available but not open source being fair and being some "middle ground" between proprietary and FLOSS. User empowerment and freedom is not only 50% lost in the process, it is almost totally lost. There are few things we can do with some code we can't use anyway. There's nothing fair to the user about proprietary software, and the source availability of the software is only barely relevant to this. There's no middle ground: either you have the fundamental rights allowing you to control your computing, or you don't have them.

I think seeing those things as fair / middle grounds is a dangerous idea. The idea that open source prevents doing business and open source needing some taming down for businesses to succeed is also dangerous.

There's a reason to be adamant with the "purity" of licenses being free software without compromise. It's because if you lose even one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the free software definition, you lose control of your computing.

I guess I probably sound like some fanatic.

To be clear, I was not part of the people reacting on the Winamp repository, and I think things need to be discussed respectfully.

If it was inevitable that it was going to get taken down then it was never a gift in the first place.

Here's some backstory to what happened from a former Llama Group (Winamp owners) employee who suggested the open source release. He was envisioning something similar to Doom's GPL release, but management couldn't be convinced that the code had nothing more than historical value (likely explaining the dumb license) and everyone who had worked on the legacy Winamp codebase got laid off before the release was announced (likely explaining why there was so much proprietary code in the repo, anyone who knew it was there no longer worked for the company). Honestly the whole thing seems like a desperate PR move by a dying company, it's a shame that the license prevents the community from taking over the project after Llama Group goes under. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-op...

I occasionally submit PRs to open source projects on github. One time a reviewer asked me to completely rework the code for no functional difference but to just do it the way he would have done it. I just said "it fixes a bug, take it or leave it." and left it at that. It saw it was merged in eventually but couldn't really care less. I wouldn't generate too much emotional attachment to a code segment because heartbreak at some point is inevitable.

It will depend if they can filter out the trolls fortje feedback of well meaning and worried FOSS contributors. That filtering is sadly an important part of navigating the modern social media.

Presumably it (would have) been re-uploaded after a scrub.

Not joking: maybe we need tools to audit / disassemble binaries and match their symbols against known GPL libraries?

Would help a lot, I think.

That is clearly not what I said.

They should have open sourced from the start, then such a drama would never have happened. But if you start propietary, become very popular and then open-source, you really have to be careful with what you open-source. It's just how copyright law works. And we can't just ignore the copyright law in just this one case because it's Winamp, unfortunately.

> this effort

revealing Winamp was breaking GPL and several commercial licenses.

> I checked his github profile

You do realize that GitHub is not the only place people can share code and that even on github not all contributions will be visible on your profile? Many notable open source developers don't even have a GitHub profile at all or just a dummy one to prevent others from claiming their commits because GitHub allows that without verifying email ownership.