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

We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code - that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal delete third party non-FOSS software.

The other thing we lost is that future companies will think again before making their code public. It's already such an incredibly rare thing in the wild, but now companies and their lawyers will see that Winamp was exposed to potentially lawsuitable behavior that wouldn't have come to light had they never opened the code.

All of this happened because the company didn't want to open source the code, they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the open source community. If another company wants to do the same and they decide not to because of this, nothing of value is lost.

> they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the open source community.

This is such a ridiculous accusation. Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor? Why can't authors just provide access to source code, but reserve some or all of the distribution rights? It's their code, after all. Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under the terms set forth; anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license.

It doesn't always have to be a binary choice between open source and closed source, nor does it justify further accusations of "openwashing."

Didn't the original version of their license state that you weren't allowed to do anything with the code, including forking it? It was "source available" but you're not even allowed to make a local copy of the code to look at it. People as a whole don't mind source available, Louis Rossman's FUTO's software is all source available and while they got a small minority of FOSS diehards complaining about it, they're doing great. Immich, FUTO Keyboard, FUTO Voice input, and Grayjay, are all source available, but the company was honest and didn't try to pull stupid shit like "you're not allowed to fork the code" in their license.

To me, this seems to be a misunderstanding of the license text and the author's intent. The original license simply reserved all distribution rights. People assumed you couldn't even fork into a public GitHub repo in order to make pull requests, but afaict, the author clarified that the intent was not to prevent forking on GitHub, but to prevent redistribution of the forked software instead of contributing the changes back upstream. The right to make changes to the software for internal use was always there, afaict.

How the hell do you combine "open source" and "all distribution rights are reserved for the original developer"? That's a nonsensical combination, the whole point of open source is that you can make your own copy with your own changes and distribute it to people

I guess it's readable source instead of open source.