I don't really understand why people complained.
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.
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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.
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.
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.