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

(arstechnica.com)
431 points dangle1 | 1 comments | 16 Oct 24 16:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.217s | source
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arp242 ◴[16 Oct 24 18:09 UTC] No.41861943[source]▶
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.

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freedomben ◴[16 Oct 24 18:30 UTC] No.41862181[source]▶
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.

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kevindamm ◴[16 Oct 24 18:53 UTC] No.41862480[source]▶
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.

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1. jraph ◴[16 Oct 24 19:33 UTC] No.41862934[source]▶
> 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.