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

And here's another story to add to the book "How to shoot yourself in the foot by not knowing how the Internet and software licenses work", should anyone write that one day.

Also, from one ArsTechnica link posted later in this story, one former dev told that the 4 WA Legacy developers were fired and soon he left too, so I guess they presumably had either no one or very few resources who knew that code and were in the best position to audit it before public release. This is not just shooting oneself in the foot; it rather looks like dancing on a landmine.

It's not clear their license was open source, actually. OSI Makes free distribution the first part of the definition of open source, as well the ability to create derived works[1]. Their rule against forking might clash against that.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd

> It’s all downsides with entitled shutins getting their rare drama fix

>> It's not clear their license was open source, actually. OSI Makes free distribution the first part of the definition of open source, as well the ability to create derived works[1]. Their rule against forking might clash against that.

Thank you for your satirical post to highlight the type of person OP was mocking.

I feel like there should be some kind of exception for proprietary code that's published in good faith. Though I'm not sure that could work if the company wanted to stay in control of the code.

It's not ideal if the way the software was written was itself illegal. Still the advantages of having it out in the open seem to outweigh the benefits of litigating all license violations.

Here's a statement from the co-author of Winamp, Justin Frankel:

> If I did have any desire, it would be extinguished by the license terms, lol. The terms are completely absurd in the way they are written, e.g. "You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software." So arguably making any changes would be considered "creating a forked version." But even taking these terms as they are likely intended (which is slightly more permissive than how they are written), they are terrible. No thank you.

https://www.askjf.com/index.php?q=7357s

And here's a statement from one of the recent maintainers of Winamp:

> I worked at Winamp till this February. I was the one that suggested the we'd open-source all the player code that belonged to us (so stripping all the Dolby, Intel IPP, etc stuff that wasn't owned by Winamp), so that the community was free to do whatever it wanted with it. I envisioned something à la DOOM GPL release. Amongst ourselves we joked about seeing enthusiasts create a Winamp-for-your-smart-fridge or Linux port. That would have been pretty cool. Instead that proposal was repeatedly ignored by management which couldn't be convinced that this decades-old spaghetti code had nothing more than historical value. "Why would we give our IP away ?! We paid for that". As if VLC, Foobar2000, etc didn't exist ...

https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-op...

But sure. All the pushback is totally from "entitled shutins". Definitely people who have never even used Winamp and just want to manufacture outrage. Uh huh.