Winamp Legacy player source code is now open

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GitHub - WinampDesktop/winamp: Iconic media player.
Iconic media player. Contribute to WinampDesktop/winamp development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Used this software a lot during my college days

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Excellent news! Honestly one of best news recently. Winamp for many people is a player that was used even in childhood. I remember many players used it’s skins even on old mobile phones (not smartphones). Seeing it open now is just amazing! :heart:

Edit: Oh, did you saw that repository? It’s completely mess. Their license looks like generated by AI, they violates GitHub’s Terms of Service and Open Source Principles, see:

Also the issues created by trolls. I have no idea what would be the future of it. :frowning_face:

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I saw on twitter people complaining that you are not even allowed fork the repo. Is this still true?

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It was true, but this part was removed. It’s still far away from good - for some reason they try to force their own license even if they can’t write it on their own. They need to have extreme costs cuts as they were or still are using ChatGPT for some or all of the work. It’s fail of the year, but let’s give them some time and we would see in what direction it goes …

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I agree. Thanks.

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In this video it’s described what exactly gone wrong:

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In the issues section

There are all sorts of comments (some comments are not the type that we usually anticipated for GitHub style)

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Nice. Thanks for this.

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Oh, today I tried to take a look what have changed and it changed a lot … In fact everything have changed as … they have removed the entire repository. For sure after all those leaks of 3rd-party proprietary code they would have a lot of trouble as simply removing the repository would not make much differences. People made lots of forks, many people definitely clone the repository and would do so for forks especially after they have removed original repository. :man_facepalming:

I wonder if using Winamp’s code now (without 3rd-party code of course) could be considered illegal. In theory one would say that their license was very restrictive, but someone else would point out that “it was intended” to be copyleft as they explicitly stated it. Even if we assume the worst case … is it fair that other people are supposed to follow restrictive license while they made so much mess with 3rd-part licensed code and GitHub’s ToS rules? :thinking:

In my opinion as long as people would not use 3rd-party proprietary code it should be fine since:

  1. They have no rights to share 3rd-party proprietary code, so stealing it is not like “stealing” from Winamp, but from their owners (which is not exactly same because of 2nd point below) :ninja:

  2. Cloning, modifying and redistribution of Winamp’s source code should be completely legal as the owners of it have shared it on GitHub. By using it they need to follow the rules which makes all copies of their code fully legal as they have no right to not allow it when since their first commit :see_no_evil:

However there are still some questions:

  1. How to license copies that we think are legal :question:
  2. Are we allowed to redistribute copies in binary form (which is restricted by the Winamp’s license) :copyright:

Again it’s just my opinion, but since the license itself was generated by AI and violates ToS then there should be closest license to the parts that are considered as legal i.e. since the license mentions that’s copyleft people should use GPL, AGPL and LGPL. :+1:

Now the second question … I did not heard about source-only copyleft (if there is I’m wrong), so most probably distribution even in binary form should be fine. If not it’s still not a big issue. If community decides to rewrite it to use for example Qt then it would be easily installed in at least Gentoo and Arch based distributions. In general building projects on Debian-based distributions is well documented as well, so there should not be any problem for people interested in it. :building_construction:

Of course at the end it’s worth to mention that there are much more, better and modern alternatives for Winamp. Some of them allows to use it’s skins and even plugins, so people interested in this topic does not have to worry even if all copies of Winamp would be permanently removed. :rocket:

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