If you picked today in your hackerspace’s sweepstake on when Winamp would pull their code repository, congratulations! You’re a winner! The source for the Windows version of the venerable music player was released on GitHub three weeks ago, and after some derision over its licence terms, a bunch of possible open source violations, and the inadvertent release of some proprietary third-party code, it’s been taken down. We’re sure that if you still have a burning desire to look at it then it won’t be too difficult to find a copy through your favorite search engine, leaving the question of what really just happened.
It’s fairly obvious that the owners of the code lacked some level of understanding of just what open source really is, based on their not-really-open licence and all those code leaks. They did back down on not allowing people to create forks, but it’s evident that they didn’t anticipate the reaction they got. So were they merely a bit clueless, or was it all just a publicity stunt involving a piece of software that’s now of more historical than practical interest? It’s possible we’ll never know, but the story has provided those of us sitting on the fence eating popcorn with some entertainment.
Interesting insights from someone who (allegedly) was inside this circus show.
“I worked at Winamp till this February. I was the one that suggested the we’d open-source all the player code that belonged to us (so stripping all the Dolby, Intel IPP, etc stuff that wasn’t owned by Winamp), so that the community was free to do whatever it wanted with it. I envisioned something à la DOOM GPL release. Amongst ourselves we joked about seeing enthusiasts create a Winamp-for-your-smart-fridge or Linux port. That would have been pretty cool. Instead that proposal was repeatedly ignored by management which couldn’t be convinced that this decades-old spaghetti code had nothing more than historical value. “Why would we give our IP away ?! We paid for that”. As if VLC, Foobar2000, etc didn’t exist …
As a last resort, I played the PR angle : After our NFT adventures (barf), the Winamp “brand” took a hit with enthusiasts, so maybe releasing the code would give us some positive attention for once? That got us from a solid NO to a MAYBE …
Months passed and nothing happened. The 4 legacy player dev’s got fired before we could clean-up the code for publication. I left soon after.
I was surprised when they announced the code release. Somehow minds had changed ? I was even more surprised when they followed through with the code’s publication.
Sadly, as the world has now witnessed, the release is a shitshow. (Indicative of the company lol)
No one audited the code, no legal review, the licence is probably AI-generated … No one took the time to do this right. I’m so dissapointed :(
Also “the Brussels-based Llama Group SA, with roughly 100 employees”. I don’t know why I keep seeing that. Llama sold TargetSpot to Azerion, and then fired half the remaining staff. The whole group is down to mayyyybe 30-something people. There was so much free-space in our offices that we could have hosted the olympics :p”
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-open-source-coders-into-frenzy-with-its-source-release.1503409/post-43214470
How is it that they existed this long anyway? I haven’t seen the product in ages.
It’s all I use.
Can you provide me the link…please I want to use it too but don’t know which one is authentic.
No idea how to find Winamp, but if all you need is a minimalistic player in the same spirit, you may like qmmp, whch is Open Source and multiplatform.
https://qmmp.ylsoftware.com/downloads.php
There was a Mac port somewhere as well.
you only named alternatives that are worse than winamp. You should have named an alternative that is better: AIMP
QMMP is decent and can use Winamp skins too though on Windows I still use Winamp.
AIMP can even use winamp plugins and has a fully fledged tag editor with auto tagging
QMMP got no tag editor and skins are ugly.
Foobar2000 is fantastic and I’ll fight any who disagree.
Foobar is better than winamp in my regard and there are a myriad of reasons for that. The aforementioned winamp shitshow being a new one but still very valid.
I didn’t ever use foobar2000 and its ui was complicated compared to what I’m used to. But I think it’s a cool software. It has an addon that lets you open audio music files from PS3 game discs and extract out each individual audio channel in full quality. So cool! The “specialized” programs for that I found weren’t nearly as capable
I had never heard of it until today, and their first UI screenshot is of AEnima, so they must have something going for them.
Ooh me first! Functionally I’m sure it’s fine but the interface looks to have been built by someone whose erotic fantasies all involve excel. I’m sure it’s customisable to make work but you need to give people a sensible starting point
I think a lot of people misunderstand foobar 2000. If you spend too much time trying to make it beautiful, you’ll end up making it fragile. I would urge you to consider the following – how often are you actually looking at your media player that you need it to be beautiful? When I use foobar, it is extremely useful and does exactly what I want, and it’s probably buried under four or five windows anyway so what does it matter how it looks.
I think a lot of people misunderstand foobar2000. You can make it very pretty but that also makes it very fragile. I use foobar2000 because it has a great feature set and that’s exactly what I want. To those obsessed with making their music player beautiful I would ask you one question – how often are you just looking at your music player? When I use fooobar2000, about the only customization I use is a couple of changes to the status bar, and organizing the windows in the locations I want. Most of the time, however, it’s buried behind seven or eight windows so who cares what it looks like?
Someone could have copy and pasted the code. So the damage is done. No way to pr this.
Oh no! Anyway…
Haha!
It doesn’t seem they understood what they had, nevermind open source licences.
Sure, to have so much GPL and other problematic code mixed in there tells you that over the decades the original developers either didn’t understand open source licences or didn’t respect them.
From the way it was released it’s also clear that the current owners don’t understand open source norms (maybe they sort of understand software licences in an extremely limited capacity since they did bother to set their own terms).
But the biggest conclusion I draw from all of this is that they simply didn’t understand their own asset. Whoever the current owners are, they had no idea what the IP composition of their codebase was or why that might matter. They dug out an old zip file and chucked it on the internet, not knowing that it could reveal legal liability presumably inherited from the original devs. Had they done the due diligence to know about the composition of their and the legal risks releasing it might pose, they would have never entertained the idea of ever releasing it.
I’ve heard tell that there’s no way in hell nvidia would ever consider open-sourcing their proprietary driver for similar reasons. There’s presumably all kinds of code from 3rd parties in there in addition to code nvidia wrote themselves, and maybe open sourcing it would even reveal a few improper acquisitions from projects like MESA or the linux kernel. When they started demoing their newfound friendliness to open source they did so with a completely new open source driver which while a non-upstreamable toy was also completely new code written from scratch.
composition of their code*
It was more a compost
The presumption of guilt is unwarranted without evidence of guilt.
In many instances closed source simply has code licensed from third parties that cannot be released. Relicensing isn’t always an option and rewriting is time consuming. This ignores any proprietary secrets code could also reveal.
Most blatant rumours regarding open source violation are just community pushing against proprietary code. Toxic mud slinging.
Like many people, I’m surprised Winamp isn’t merely relegated to the history books. It’s been irrelevant for ages; most of the inappropriately licensed/unlicensed code probably began after the applications relevancy was slipping and they started tossing in the kitchen sink.
They are wrong, and it was just incompetence, but the update before pulling the project was malicious all the same. There was zero reason to try to restrict the repo or write a restrictive license, but they couldn’t help themselves. Meanwhile, complaints of Open Source violations are not overblown. In closed development it is common to use Open Source code with little understanding, but utterly no care. This is especially true with software contracted out to India and China. It’s why their distribution source ends up an unspeakable nightmare in a tar ball.
“It’s fairly obvious that the owners of the code lacked some level of understanding of just what open source really is”
The reporting if this entire thing on this site has been garbage. There were articles posted linking to things where basic reading can’t have been done.
I like criticism, especially criticism of others :-), but I find this post short on factual details to support the expressed view.
Simply looking back at the previous posts on the subject and comment sections would be the only sensible approach.
This why we can’t have nice things.
“I wish more companies released source code” and immediately wish granted “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG”.
This has gone poorly but the “outcry” and “outrage” from the community that supposedly loved WinAmp has achieved only one thing.
Companies will use this as yet another reason you shouldn’t release source code for projects.
“This is why we can’t have nice things”
Nothing to do with them leaking a bunch of third party, proprietary code and the rest of their train wreck behaviour?
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-open-source-coders-into-frenzy-with-its-source-release.1503409/post-43214470
Yep. All that will be remembered is, we’ll look what happened with WinAmp.
And it will end anyone saying, hey just release the code as is. Even in the hobbyist community we have an issue with this, so many projects “will be released once I clean up the code” and crickets and tumbleweed.
The WinAmp debacle has made a single thing very clear from a business perspective.
Once you’re done with the code, delete it forever. Don’t let anyone see it!
Your 100% correct. That was my first thought too. The only way to ever fix this is to just make code patentable at best and remove its eligibility for copyright.
Code isnt a “creative” work, its an instruction set for a computer. Yes, creativity and creative solutions sometimes appear in code, this is why so much of it is proprietary and closed source and hidden away. That seems to.work fine. At least with a patent the code can be protected for a reasonably short commercially reasonable period of time. Right now it being under copyright makes it essentially a cradle to grave protection, actually even longer and multi generational protection. Considering coding as we know it is not much more then 50 years old then copyright just means most code gets lost to time because of its short useful life in most cases.
Copyright is vital to the modern world, but currently it’s term length and wide application is becoming more and more detrimental to our future society.
Release it, don’t whinge about it.
YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! is not, NOR NEVER!! will be a synonym for give the people what they want.
And Big Corpo is not people. People is people.
I’m speechless.
.. so it’s the Open Source community that’s to be blamed,
because it’s disappointed because the Winamp ‘release’ violates all sorts of licenses and can’t be used thus?
Because the forces behind the release are incapable of acting in law?
Did it cross the mind that such an “illegal” release might actually be potentionally harmful to free Winamp clones?
Now since the code was made public, then removed again?
Now every Winamp clone might being under suspicion that it might use third-party code that wasn’t meant to be free.
This ‘release’ of Winamp looks no different to a code leak now.
Speaking under correction, but I think something similar had happened with Win2k source code, who had been leaked many years ago.
The leak did hurt free projects like ReactOS, for example.
A lot of code had to be rewritten from scratch, in order to prevent any relationship to Win2k code.
A lot of open source fans are idiots though.
On HAD years ago someone published a soldering iron as open source. An open source fan aka idiot promptly complained it wasn’t really open source as they used a Weller tip and since that was proprietary, well, y’know.
“The WinAmp debacle has made a single thing very clear from a business perspective.”
Indeed. Legally incompetent shouldn’t do business.
That’s a garbage take. The community wants companies to release their code, not other people’s code, and preferably as open source.
This was always a very jaded attempt by the Llama group to have their cake and eat it. They wanted free advertising and free work without actually giving anything away.
I genuinely hope other companies will learn from this. The open source and hacking communities are ready to give their appreciation and loyalty to companies that give the same back, but trying to take advantage of people rubs them the wrong way.
“Companies will use this as yet another reason you shouldn’t release source code for projects.”
Good. That will make it easy to identify companies that are working against our best interests.
Au contraire.. I appreciate it a lot when incompetent managers who don’t know what the concept of open source means inadvertently release their source code and everyone gets to snatch a copy before they realize their mistake. It’s a great thing, they should continue to be encouraged to do so
“a piece of software that’s now of more historical than practical interest”
Well, screw you too! I’m not old, you’re old!
When ageism comes for our code.
Fun fact: 1998 is actually closer to the age of the dinosaurs than it is to the present day
I know, right? It’s still the only Windows MP3 player I ever use!
If open source is that good then why Winamp become de facto standard?
They had 3decades to come up with better solution.
Winamp hasn’t been a ‘de facto standard’ anything for literally decades.
Plug-ins. Themes/Skins. Shoutcast network (formerly). Low hw requirements (486DX4-100, NT4/W95).
github flags all kinds of code as malicious then asks you to pay a fee for support. I recently had an issue where I forked some random codes and a year later they were flagged as malicious and I could not delete my own forked repo so they marked me as malicious as well. All this is trite and foolish as these “wannabe contracts” they call licensing are not a legal binding agreement, none of this will hold up in court and it’s just par for the course with online social media and github is the computer guy’s social media. You just can’t have something that is real on a poser social media internet site. It’s that simple. Winamp is too good for github. Most the SOURCE CODE these days is just a frontend ui making api calls or something simple, the real stuff they don’t open source otherwise they would not be in business. It’s all quite complex and mystical until you understand how it works then it becomes boring. Github is controlled by the same people as facebook msn, google, etc… these people just want to ban you for not following suit. It’s merely a control mechanism.
Here’s a dirty little secret: You don’t need GitHub to code!
Or to to share the code. You can still have your own web.
Winamp, it really whips the Llamas ass!
I am a big fan of Justin Frankel and the WinAmp team. Others looked up to earlier pioneers like Bill Gates, Jobs, or later folks like Mark Zuckerberg or Matt Mullenweg, I came into the industry when WinAmp, Napster, and Netscape/Firebird (Firefox now) were the innovations from envelope pushing entrepreneurs. 1997-2003 a lot of great stuff was made that changed the world folks today take for granted.
I don’t look at this as a scar on the past of WinAmp, just a by-product of what happens over the years with an app that is closed source. If you look at other WinAmp spinoffs such as NSIS, the original WinAmp devs know how to make great open source software. An audio player at that time on the other hand was a much more complicated tapp to develop, hence it’s success at the time and why it was closed source.
I use WinAmp every day, with the skin I like and it handles the .mp3’s I have with zero problems.
Sure, I could use VLC or some other media player, buy why bother? All I want it to do is play some lists or an entire directory of something, and it does.
I know its popular to move on to < current thing > just because, but in this case its worked for so long it seems a bit silly just to delete it for some other program.
I still use the Zune media player purely to be annoying
I use the Zune software because it’s good. (I also use my Zune HD daily)
I guess the llama finally fought back…
:)
I think part, maybe a small part, but a part none the less is how so many open tards like to jump any anything they cant copy and paste and get everything free. I released the source to a project right here on HAD years ago, and so many people complained the compiler I used was no open/free – seriously, I shared some source and still complaints… I have tried a few time, and I just got sick of it. And lest we forget most of these open tards are hypocrites. The microcode on their cpu is not opensource, the verilog to the fpga’s in their switches are not open source. So winamp, love it or hate it, too much backlash because they were just trying to share.
Purists often sabotage the very thing they are so overzealous about. Tale as old as time
“So winamp, love it or hate it, too much backlash because they were just trying to share.”
Um, I was with you until the last line. I think the situation was a bit more complex here.
The folks who have released the code were unlikely being the Winamp devs here.
Because they surely had the competence to do it right.
Heck, any venerable VB6 programmer who has never touched Linux and GPL/FOSS used to have more competence about Freeware, Shareware, Public Domain and software licenses in general.
No, the motives for the release were something different likely.
Must have been more of a marketing stunt, I suppose.
Oh no well good thing i downloaded it
I haven’t owned an mp3 file since long time, so never needed the WinAmp. But when I did nothing brought me joy other than the WinAmp, and its beautiful skins