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

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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...

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.