In the last five months, Winamp, the iconic music player from the recent past, has been on quite a journey. It started with exciting news, which caused great enthusiasm, but sadly, things didnโt turn out well in the end. If you missed what happened, hereโs a quick recap.
Winamp Goes Open Source
In mid-May, Winamp surprised everyone by announcing plans to make the player open source. The goal was to give developers worldwide a chance to contribute to bringing back Winamp’s former glory from oblivionโthe music player that dominated its niche in the late 90s and early 2000s.
The news sparked a lot of excitement and positive reactions. The main reason? Nostalgia. Many longtime computer users fondly remember Winamp from their early days of using computers. It seemed like a great idea, but unfortunately, things began to take a turn for the worse after that. Here’s why.
Where It All Went Wrong
At the end of September, Winamp’s code was made publicly available on GitHub, marking a move toward open source. However, somewhere here, all good things ended due to a series of confusing licensing issues, which revealed that the software’s owners didn’t fully grasp the values and principles behind the open-source movement.
The code was released under Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) v1.0, where point 5, Restrictions, clearly and explicitly states:
No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.
A restriction that violates and conflicts with GitHub’s ToS (Terms of Service). But what’s more interesting is that this suggests that the Winamp owners were surprisingly unfamiliar with the rules. Quickly realizing their mistake, the license was updated to v1.0.1 after only a few days, when the absurd clause no longer appeared.
Everything would have been fine if this was the only misunderstanding, but unfortunately, the “opening” of the Winamp code came with several other issues. The code included thousands of lines from third-party software that was not part of the open-source family. To make things even worse, the license included this clause:
No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
In other words, it has nothing to do with open source. 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.” Needless to say, this unleashed a wave of negative comments and reactions from the open-source community that led to the software’s swan song.
The Winamp’s Swan Song
A few days ago, only three weeks after making its code public, Winamp suddenly deleted its entire GitHub repository without notice. There’s really not much else to say about it.
Even if there was any chance that the Winamp idea could be revived, this action by the current software owners put the final nail in the coffin.
With its series of unpredictable actions, showing a profound misunderstanding of the concept and philosophy around which open source is built, Winamp has effectively ended its brief adventure in trying to revive its lost glory.
In summary, Winamp has never been open-source software, and its efforts to become so have been a complete disaster. So, farewell, Winamp, and thanks for all the memories. But now itโs 2024, and times have changed.
