- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
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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.
So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code
Not necessarily, the SFC is involved in a big case regarding Vizio about this right now. The FSF was brought in to explain the intended interpretation and spirit of the GPL.
Yeah but I’m not gonna sue or risk getting sued over it.
Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.
Wouldn’t an end user of something that should be GPLed be able to request the source?
Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.
The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.
Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.
However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.
That depends a lot on how the license gets interpreted and how license violations are handled by the local law. The argument for why the end user cannot do anything about GPL violation is that the violated contract is between upstream and the “bad” developer - the upstream project gave the bad developer access to their source code under the condition that the license stays the same. You as the end user only get exposed to the bad developer’s license, so you can’t do anything. It’s the upstream who must force them to extend a proper license to you.
However there was also a case recently where the FSF argued that this interpretation / handling of the situation is against the spirit of GPL and I think they won, so… Yeah, it’s just unclear. Which is normal for legal texts (IMHO intentionally, but I’m not here to rag on lawyers, so I’ll leave it at that).
Any details on that case you remember? Sounds fascinating.
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 the code etc. They just released it and started the shit show.
What a shitty company
Yeah well, VLC has been open source for 23 years.
Do people really use VLC to listen to music?
Music, no. All sorts of other audio like BBC radio dramas, yes.
I used to, 15 years ago.
Good times.
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.
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.
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
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.
Strawberry is really great. It’s the only music player I use anymore. Only bummer is no DSD support. I get it though. There isn’t enough developers to maintain such a thing.
Tauon is my favorite music player. Don’t hear about it much. Handles large libraries really well. Pretty sure it will play DSD too. https://github.com/Taiko2k/Tauon or https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.taiko2k.tauonmb
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.
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
Maybe WinAmp was the llama all along.
WinAmp hurt itself while slapping
Whips?
Of course!
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.
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
That is pretty cool actually - I didn’t know about that!
And besides QMMP, Audacious also traces its code roots back to XMMS.
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.
Same weird non-sequiturs chain that foobar2000 author uses.
They could’ve honestly said “I don’t wanna”, and that would be the end of 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
well that was… something
