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.

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.

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.