A few days ago the source code for the popular Winamp music player was released into the world, with as we reported at the time, a licence that left a lot to be desired. Since then it seems some of the criticism has caught up with the company, for not only have they modified their terms to allow forking, they’ve reacted to a bunch of claimed GPL violations by removing offending files. Perhaps How-To-Geek are right in describing it all as an absolute mess.
The forking amendment means that with luck we’ll start seeing a few modified players descending from the Winamp code, and it seems that the GPL violations are more embarrassing technicalities than show-stoppers, but we have to wornder whether or not this makes for something with any more than historical interest. Perhaps its value stands in a lesson for corporate entities in how not to release their source, which sadly we expect will be taken by other organisations as an excuse not to do so.
If you’re following the Winamp source code saga you can read our coverage from when it came out. It will be interesting to see where this story goes.
Good on them for acting on feedback and being responsive to GPL violation claims.
I think the idea here is that forks will cause compatibility issues, because Winamp is largely modular. Almost all major functions like audio output or playlist handling are actually plugins that simply ship with the standard package. Break direct binary compatibility, whoops, now you have N different versions of Winamp that are each broken in their unique way and there’s no concerted effort to fix the faults or bring the improvements back into a single release – just like what happens with Linux and many of the open source software suites…
What they’re saying is, if you’re making modifications, you can develop on your own but if you want to distribute it then bring it out through us.
Corporations; don’t bother releasing code as a goodwill gesture. The internet will crucify you for it.