WinAmp's Open Source Story Is Over
WinAmp's Open Source Story Is Over
Without warning, WinAmp deleted its entire GitHub repository, effectively ending the whole story around open-sourcing the music player code.
Here's the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That's it.The 'Winamp source license' was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.
There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn't actually own the rights to.
This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.
Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can't be legally used or distributed.
improperly included GPL code
Shouldn't that force a GPL release of the rest of the code, at least the bits they had the rights to?
Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.
Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.
Complicating that however, is the fact that if it's a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of 'authors' and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.
The former developers really want to publish it as OSS. This was ignored and the developers gradually dropped out. Then the management decided "anyway, a former developer had a good PR idea, let's do it" and there was no one left to check etc. They just released it and started the shit show.
Yeah well, VLC has been open source for 23 years.
Do people really use VLC to listen to music?
Yes in android
I used to, 15 years ago.
Good times.
Music, no. All sorts of other audio like BBC radio dramas, yes.
Yes. I mostly use it for video though, but since my Video and Music libraries are side by side, I play my music in it too. I'm not really interested in the visualizer stuff so I'm not looking directly at the player, but I think I know what you are going to say, that it's organization and search capabilities for music has a lot of room for improvement, ha.
I used, but today I use Clementine (is still alive) and sometimes QMMP with some winamp skin
VLC It's a good Music player if you only need to play music
If we can synthesize the idea of WinAmp owners, it would sound like, “Please contribute your free labor in an attempt to monetize the app in pursuit of our financial goals.”
I've made a comment like that somewhere. They wanted free labor to make some money, that's all. Lol. It was a failed attempt at exploiting people's emotions.
It's astonishing that they were so open about it. They didn't even hide to try to hide it
That license was laughable and blatant
WinAmp owners
I'm a visual person so I need to put a face to these windowlickers to laugh at in my head.
Is it this guy?
I don't know. Try visualising him with Milkdrop.
What a shitty company
For one is was under a license what not only not Foss but completely violated Github TOS.
Also the repo had a bunch of code they didn't own the rights to like the Adobe stuff.
I like how they were like “you can’t fork this repo” and it’s like — actually yes I can.
Yeah, like one of the few things GitHub actually requires you to let people do is press the dang fork button.
Statement from dev about the shit show
That truly is a shitshow
Yep, but I think it's good for the former dev's to see what crap the management is making and instead of taking credit, they're more likely to get a shitstorm.
Just sad for the work of the dev's.
The FOSS story, yes. But the code is out there. Even the stuff they weren't supposed to share.
Can you name any userbase more ready to pirate the shit out of a third-party fork? Maybe the people still using Media Player Classic.
Inwish i could control spotify from winamp man
And it makes no mention that they were modifying and using GPL code prior to making their code "open source".
Id argue that this story is not over until the GPL code can be confirmed removed by a third party
I understand the nostalgia surrounding Winamp—I loved it too. But with old versions still available, maybe it’s time to let it rest and look forward. Rather than holding onto the past, we have an opportunity to create new, modern tools that fit our needs today—and we can make sure they’re free and remain open-source from the start. This whole situation offers a valuable lesson: instead of relying on companies or commercial interests, we can build software as a community, ensuring it stays accessible for everyone. With over 8 billion people on the planet and so many resources available, including AI advancements, we’re more capable than ever of creating tools like Winamp—and beyond. I guess I am not understanding what the problem is here, also, someone in this thread has already pointed out that we still have VLC, which IMO works exceptionally well!
That's the sad part. If there's one thing that the open-source community produces an abundance of, it's definitely text editors, but music players are a close second.
Previously, we've had XMMS as an open-source project that supported WinAmp skins.
And right now, perfectly actively maintained, there is QMMP.I'd bet money that the code quality of QMMP is a lot higher than that of WinAmp. So, if anyone wanted an open-source WinAmp, it was there all along.
QMMP is great. Personally I don't care much for Winamp-style music players (Strawberry Music and Tauon Music Box are my favourites right now) but QMMP opens anything I ask it to, has an alright default skin, and is obviously heavily customizable with afaik Winamp skin compatibility. It was time to leave Winamp over a decade ago.
See! I had not heard of QMMP, it looks great, thanks for sharing that :)
Between VLC and butterchurnviz.com if I want a visualizer, I'm pretty set.
I watched a video a little while ago , I think the only value winamp has is nostalgic and historical. If it was really open source maybe we could get a really good fork and that's about it, I think. Maybe I'm missing the point, let me know I'm not very smart at this stuff.
Legal issues aside, are there any publicly available forks of the repo?
Repository ownership appearently got transferred to "alexfreud"; my fork on GitHub of the original repo redirects to it.
https://github.com/alexfreud/winamp
For reference, the fork I made
Same here.
Not Open-Source, but there's a fork called WACUP, which is Winamp with modern features.
Website states: "It is however not being done as an open source project & there are other options out there if that's something you need your software to be. It does rely on open source libraries & a number of modified plug-ins for which their changes are being provided to comply with their code licensing requirements.
Ultimately I don't want to spend the time to run a properly done open source project when there's no guarantee of any assistance vs the overhead involved & my time management isn't great so spending more time on project management isn't imho a good use of my time."
I also hold to the view that source code without at least 1 developer is pointless & implies a dead / abandoned project. I do appreciate that it does allow for taking things on if it's then entered into such a state without any developer(s) attached as I've done with some of the plug-ins which has benefited WACUP. So whilst I'm in a position to keep making WACUP I don't intend on open sourcing all of it & view doing that as the end of my time developing it.
For those that want some additional details Brodie Robertson created a video on what was happening 3 weeks ago on how things were going into the lead up to this. Here's the link. It's 16 minutes long and kind of funny. It shows how mismanaged things were from the beginning
Would anyone care if they did? I didn't see anyone reviving xmms and that is open source.
Well, qmmp is very much alive: https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com
well that was... something
AIMP [Windows/Android] has been my Winamp replacement for ~15 years. I've never found a player that comes close to rivalling it.
P.S. I have no idea what the licence is for AIMP, I just know it's free and is excellent. You don't need Winamp.
To me, one of the best players for windows along with foobar2000
I've been using it on Android because of its seamlessly crossfade feature (i.e. the next music/replay gets faded in as the current music is approaching the end). I made some loops with Audacity and it's the only music player that manages to play them endlessly with no gaps.
What did they realize that they open sourced their product a decade too late for anyone to actually revive it?
People are saying that the repo contained third-party code, some of which was proprietary, some was GPL. That's two angles from which they could be sued very easily...
TIL Winamp was still active as a project
It wasn't, really. It was passed around as IP for a long time like a used car everyone wanted to fix & sell, but no one wanted to do anything with.
🦙Nooo