Open-sourcing of WinAmp Goes Badly As Owners Delete Entire Repo (theregister.com) 56
New submitter king*jojo writes: The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs. The deletion happened soon after The Register enquired about the seeming inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some Microsoft and Intel codecs.
Forked? (Score:1)
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The source code release – prior to the deletion yesterday – has been a somewhat bumpy ride. The initial release had a custom license, the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0, containing the clause:
No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.
Re:Forked? (Score:4, Interesting)
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What makes you think their licence was written by lawyers?
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Re:Forked? (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked for a startup that made an ebook reader and we were going to make our money by renting out textbooks to college students for a semester. Except we never actually secured the digital rights with any of the text book publishers and only had the rental rights for the print versions from our partner company.
It's amazing how quickly people can flush several million dollars down the toilet.
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They may have had AI draft the license rather than spending money on lawyers. So dumb, but at least not a huge waste of money.
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I suppose "you can look, but don't touch" is an improvement over "trust me", but they probably didn't want people looking at the parts that weren't actually theirs.
Sounds like they have a bunch of clowns running the show.
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Of course it was cloned. A million times.
You see that bag over there? There used to be a cat in it.
Re:Forked? (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that they have themselves exposed their felony (what a bunch of morons, this is actually hard to believe) I have little doubt that Microsoft and Intel will sue llama out of their skin for using their source code in their app for 30 years now. We might have a discovery that will show the source code :-D
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Think of the message this sends to other companies if they don't sue: Well, you can use our source code in your product, we're too lazy to sue
Your IP needs to be enforced, otherwise it's worthless.
Re:Forked? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is actually one of the reasons Nintendo is so aggressive about protecting their IP. If anything gets traction they go after it or legally they put themselves in a bind if they start selectively enforcing their IP and could even lose court cases.
They can easily argue they weren't aware of X infringement when it's small enough, but yeah, any fan stuff hits a certain size that they /have/ to be aware of it, basically they're required to send a cease and desist and pursue it or they could fail challenges to infringements that are actually hurting their company.
Re:Forked? (Score:4, Insightful)
First thing I do with valueable items, I download the whole batch.
Llama group (Score:5, Funny)
Enough about me, let's look at Llama group. They have one of the most generic corporate websites I have ever seen [llama-group.com]. It looks like it was built as a junior college project or something.
"What we do, we do it well" unless it involves periods, apparently.
"We help you grow your business"
"We shape a better futur" ([sic] exact quote).
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On a page called "Who are we" they have a stock photo of people who they definitely aren't.
I think everyone got the feeling that a llama was really going to get whipped here. Can't put my finger on why.
Re:Llama group (Score:4, Interesting)
Ineptitude confirmed
Re:Llama group (Score:5, Informative)
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. ... No one took the time to do this right. I'm so dissapointed :(
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
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
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And by generic you mean not filled to bursting with slideovers, notices, dropdowns, and every other annoying web artifact found elsewhere. A page which simply works.
How horrible.
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Simply works and says nothing at all. It looks like someone took a generic website template and changed the company name and a few details.
It is sad that the bar for being a decent website is that it isn't intrusive and annoying.
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Any business website that talks about "solutions" immediately makes me think the blandest, most unimaginative person on earth is writing it. Either that or they don't know what their product/service is actually for.
They exposed their GPL violations (Score:5, Informative)
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That's just as bad as also releasing other people's commercial code without permission but I totally missed that angle because it was less obvious than including source code for a product they spun off, code from Microsoft and Intel, and so on.
Re:They exposed their GPL violations (Score:5, Funny)
vendoring
I think Oxford should be dictionaring that word.
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Verbing weirds language. (Bill Watterson)
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oxfording?
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I'm just happy they open-sourced their visualizer.
That is pretty cool.
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That's nice.
Now you can sue to get the code, if you have a copy of the binaries that contain that code.
Darn... (Score:3)
I knew I should have cloned the repo while I had the chance...
Winamp is open source like Reddit is an open forum (Score:3)
You're cordially invited to work towards improving it for free but everything you contribute belongs to them.
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I would be shocked if anyone didn't see right through that. Though I'm sure they got plenty of downloads, I wonder if they got a single upstream check-in (that wasn't a joke).
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Well, they probably figured all they had to do was throw the word "open source" around to attract suckers to work for them for free.
HDPL Version Nope (Score:3)
What did they expect? (Score:2)
This left me wondering how much... (Score:1)
LLama bad. Register bad. FOSS good. History?!? (Score:1)
It's great that Llama's "open-source" mistakes are now out in the open.
- violations of GPL
- attempts to remove GPL rights to fork or distribute
- "sharing" source code for other companies' products
That's good. This needs to be transparent and the public needs to be aware and coders should be able to use the source tree to create what they like as per the GPL (100%) and also GitHub T&Cs (0.00000001%).
The Register article was written by a drunk or an idiot or a child. There was no "pandora's jar." It's
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There was no "pandora's jar." It's a specific story in Greek mythology about Pandora's box. Jars were not in use during those times as glass-blowing hadn't matured to the point of repeatable blows with flat tops, threaded or not. If you want to be cute and change it up, use a different metaphor. Pandora's Box is its own metaphor already.
PEDANT ALERT: Greeks made clay vessels, which we now refer to as pots, but the word jar has been used to describe them through various periods of history. That said, it's still Pandora's Box, and anybody calling it a jar should get an education.
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BUT--to the author's credit--Mike Rowe's (perhaps incorrect) citation IS the first result in Bing. Which makes it an ironclad fact nowadays.
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While we're at it, I literally saw a movie three days ago where a character played by Lee Tracy says "As PT Barnum says: There's no such thing as bad publicity" that was made 30 years before Mike Rowe was born. BUT--to the author's credit--Mike Rowe's (perhaps incorrect) citation IS the first result in Bing. Which makes it an ironclad fact nowadays.
I didn't even get to the Mike Rowe thing. I'd heard that quote from PT Barnum when I was a little skippy junior, back in grade school. That would have been pre-Rowe being noticed for anything.
thats why some companies keep their code closed (Score:2)
Llama Drama (If you could see what I hear.) (Score:3)
Look, I probably have old 2.6x-tree source and other random earlier versions kicking around somewhere on a CD. I've seen it. I've compiled it. I know, second-hand but up close, just exactly how much of a train wreck Justin's initial code was, how it improved some as the ampdev community grew, and how much of it all went to complete sh*t again when AOL/Time-Warner emptied a dump truck full of money at their feet. I remember the Nitrane/NightTrain/NyTrayn (I honestly don't remember the spelling anymore) decoder debacle. I remember Tomislav Uzelac's issues with the project, and several narrowly averted lawsuits at the time of purchase against Nullsoft. Most of that was settled back in the day. But we all know that the antics kept going when Nullsoft and Spinner moved to San Francisco. We all know RIGHT NOW that that code should be refactored and updated in the extreme. And I can't see that happening with Llama Group or anyone else as AOL most likely still has an interest in, and legal claim to, the code. What we lost was a user experience that had cachet, panache, gravitas, a cool vibe. That vibe was killed by a huge corporation that just wanted to buy the community thinking something would magically happen for them without shepherding or building ...more. Lot's more. More, in terms of Shoutcast servers and websites and interoperability and probably some inter-process communication and maybe even OS integration, all while maintaining that cool vibe. Alas, life didn't flow that way. We could rebuild it. We could have JJ McKay voice over something like, "It really whips the porcupine's ass!", but it wouldn't be the same. -- The Llama Group is impaired by history. I wonder how things would be different today if Microsoft had bought the project rather than AOL/Time-Warner. -- But after it's all said and done, please, stand tall and strong against the gale and face it; WinAmp has been dead for a very, very long time. It is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to conjure the corpse. ...Or the community around it. Not without something completely new and sassy to replace it in the hearts and minds of the WinAmp faithful that won't entirely look unlike, or something like, WinAmp but won't BE WinAmp. Consider (UI/UX) skinning VLC and adding plug-in support or something but when you do it, be audacious about it. Anyone here could help build the next WinAmp, whatever it ends up being called.
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WinAmp isnt viable as a OSS project because is not viable at all.
There are plays a lot like it foobar2000, Audacious, legacy xmms if you are looking for something simple to play a list of audio files, and a bit less out of the way but a good all-rounder vlc.
The UI is easy to clone, it would probably not be hard ot even make something compatible with the existing skins, using pick your tool kit. You bolt that onto the front of gstream, libavcodec directly, windows media whatever, you will have something mor
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I remember WinAmp hit a peak and then started making things worse with every additional update. Back then I still preferred WinAmp, so when I wanted to install it I'd find an older version.
Given that it basically faded from view I suspect I wasn't alone and development on WinAmp has been an issue for a long, long time. I don't know why anyone is still bothering, it is difficult to imagine there is any profit to be found with the name.
Look at the alternatives. They are better. (Score:1)
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