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

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.

The source wasn't open though, it was available, and it was provided in a sense that fully showcased that they did not understand what they were doing. Everything from licenses that were fully unenforceable and non-compliant with Github's license agreement to illegally distributing proprietary code to fundamentally misunderstanding how to use git.

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.

It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.

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.