Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo 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. Yes, WinAmp …
Are you thinking of Eulalyzer? it was, and apparently still is, a free Windows app that will analyze a EULA and tell you of any potentially interesting words and phrases in it. It was good for discovering if there were things in the EULA that you didn't want to accept.
And yet we've been hearing that for 20 years of FOSS...and yet we've still been inundated with bugs, some serious (LogJ, Debian SSL, glibc...).
The reality of fact: those that can don't often have the free man-hours, or just will, to go through thousands of lines of other people's code to oversee the work. These people have their *own* work to be responsible for and it takes up enough of their time as it is, thankyouverymuch.
There is no "someone", there is only luck. Check The Reg news about hidden doors in open source. Some of it is extremely well watched, linux kernel as best example. But a lot of it isn't, and may contain such code in plain sight. Just nobody looks. We had more examples of that in the past than you know, and those are only the ones we found.
I think you can make a caveat for your own code, at least while its new. Once you look at someone else's code, or your own a few months later, yes.
My theory is that we aren't computers, we don't naturally read code and know exactly what it does. We have to translate text on a screen into a mental model of what it's doing before we can understand it. With code you just wrote you already have that model in your head so it's easy, but once you've moved on or with someone else's work it has to be reconstructed before you can do anything useful.
>I think you can make a caveat for your own code,
I think the opposite is true. The problem is that "have that model in your head" makes it harder for you to see things that violate that model. You designed the code with certain assumptions, maybe these assumption are wrong. Another competent code reviewer, won't be limited by your mental model or assumptions so may see things you did not.
If you go back to review it after your mental model is just a foggy memory, I think you'll have a better chance of finding missed bugs.
This post has been deleted by its author
40-something former Team Musicmatch Jukebox here (Wimamp was a buggy pile of crap!!! - but eh, it was okay in retrospect)
There was a time when Winamp vs Musicmatch Jukebox was the Mods vs Rockers of the so-called 'Napster generation' (I was way too cool to use something as mainstream as Napster)
Cloud-hosted software as a service has entered the room.
Cloud-hosted software as a service has taken over the room.
Maybe everything you ever run is open source. Not everything I run is. Sometimes, the way to get people to write the code you want to run is to pay them for it, and I don't have the funds to finance the development process myself, but I can easily afford to buy licenses for stuff I want. I prefer to run that stuff on my own computer, but if they're required to hand me the source code in that case, they'll restrict it to running on their servers or whatever environment it takes to prevent me from accessing that code.
Proprietary software is not automatically evil.
A super abundant resource? Do you mean the kind of code you get by paying hundreds of people with rare skills lots of money for a long time? Stop paying them and see how abundant that resource is. Some of the code I have bought licenses to isn't simple. It's not something I could just write if I spent a weekend. It often involves doing lots of painstaking labor, for example collecting lots of data, normalizing it into a format that can be easily handled by a program, writing a program that can do useful things to that, and then thoroughly testing that program so I can do things the authors didn't imagine and they work reliably. If open source groups got together and made that, it would be great, but in many of these cases, they didn't and won't because it is too large a task to do without paying people and they don't get enough in donations to manage it.
Let me guess. You think that, because making a copy of the files is free, that means it should be free. That doesn't work. Most of those files will not be created if the creators can't benefit by doing so. Those who are willing to do that for free already do and use open source licenses to encourage others to do the same. I am one of those people. That is me choosing to give my work away. Requiring that everything I do be treated like that would force me to do a different job, meaning less code created, both open source and proprietary. It's a bad argument every time it's tried. I'm not sure I can do anything to convince adherents of this fact, but it remains a fact.
It's only "superabundant" once it's been created. The process of creating it is expensive. That is why Copyright exists: It gives authors a limited time to profit from their work, and then their work enters the public domain. This encourages people to make stuff.
You might say that modern Copyright law is ridiculously long, the term should be shorter, and I would agree with you. You might say that when a program enters public domain, the source code should be made available too, and I would agree with you.
But the idea of Copyright is not evil. It's there for a good purpose, even if it has been partly subverted by modern corporations. It could be fixed, if there was political will to do that (which will never happen).
The original point of copyright was to encourage people to create works which would eventually become part of the Public Domain. As a sort of bribe, they were offered a few years of exclusive control over the use of the work, in return for contributing it eventually to the Public Domain.
The bribe aspect has been rather heavily abused of late; and it would harm no-one to investigate whether or not there might be a better way of encouraging the expansion of the Public Domain instead of exclusive control, however temporary.
Do you have one, and remember that your solution also needs to overcome the effects of your previous policy of "if you can copy it, then everyone can have it without restriction and you are required to release it immediately without any compensation". If you don't, I see you retreating into vagueness because your idea is harmful in many ways and you have no ability to do better. Maybe we should consider changes, but a non-specific statement like that doesn't argue in favor or against anything we currently have or anything we could do differently.
I’m a programmer and have spent my career keeping up to date with a fast changing field.
Frankly, the idea that I should use my skills for free and that by not wishing to do that I’m some how evil is offensive.
Just because the output of my brain can be duplicated without loss doesn’t mean it has no value. It also means I get to choose what happens to it. Not you.
My response to people who argue that programmes and books etc. should all be given away for free ( I don't write either of these btw) has always been to say I agree, and that I expect them to work in their daily job for free* too. I've never yet had any volunteer to do that.It's only other (i.e. creative) people who should be obliged to give their work away for free, apparently.
*Lots of us do stuff for free- but because it's stuff we want to do for free, and we usually still have a paid job ( or pension in my case). In my younger days I read William Morris's' News From Nowhere in which the ferryman takes the narrator across the river because he wanted to do some ferrying that day so had gone out to the river. Which had the opposite effect to what I assume Morris intended. It made me wonder 1) how our narrator would have got across on another day- when no one fancied a bit of rowing and 2) who did the jobs that aren't ever going to be enjoyable if they weren't getting paid.So I'm not a communist. Whereas I remember reading a social media post by one of Corbyn's supporters to the effect that after The Revolution she'd teach disabled kids macramé ( or some such). Which still begged the questions, who'd do her old job then and (assuming it wasn't that) who'd be emptying the bins?
Code is a resource, but creating code is a service. A very scarce service. Getting paid for that is not evil. Attempting to get to use a service against the will of the service provider is usually evil.
Also, code is a resource to which the creator has full moral rights. That means that I, and I alone, get to decide whether adding artificial scarcity to code I created is evil or not. You do not get to determine that, and I do not have to justify my decision.
Philosophy, I know, but since you brought the "evil" word into the conversation, you get the philosophy. It's not always intuitive, but sometimes truth is complex and we just have to deal with that.
It would he nice if companies returned to providing source code with their programs. It used to be (decades ago) common that you got the source code when you (non-exclusively) licensed a commercial software package, and you could modify it to fit your needs.
Our uni developed a custom operating system for our mainframe. We did not create the app software from scratch. We modified the app software written for the vendor-supplied operating system, to work with our custom operating system.
You’re adding a new product to be delivered for free on top of the existing functional product that’s paid for.
In experienced and mature companies this might (and could and should) just pop out for free but most companies are neither. So now you’re are either adding another potentially expensive step to release cycles (or maintaining two source trees?!) or you are demanding the entire company culture changes.
If the company started as a hacky startup there may be legacy ugly code nobody understands and more. You want customers to see that they’re paying for this? They might not like that and use it as leverage to pay less.
As a functionally benign example, consider removing the embarrassing, rude or profane comments in 500k lines of legacy source code so you won’t upset the customer. How can you achieve that without risk? How do you further enforce standards on future source code comments? Now look at non-benign stuff and you’re starting to sense the scale and cost of it.
Didn't downvote, but if you get the source and start modifying it for a specific need, that's on you. Nothing to do with the company, neither are they obligated to even consider supporting your modifications (that's likely even in the licence).
As for the profane comments, maybe if your programmers are fucking swearing in all the fucking comments, you should employ grown-ups and not wannabe techbros?
If the company started as a hacky startup there may be legacy ugly code nobody understands and more. You want customers to see that they’re paying for this? They might not like that and use it as leverage to pay less.
So corporate embarrassment is the reason we can't have nice things.
Color /me not surprised....
I can see where you are coming from, but most users would have no interest in, or understanding of, the source code, and companies may be reluctant to support such a law because it exposes their source code to their competitors. Why would they invest money in a given product if they know that before they've made the development costs back, their competitors will be able to make the same thing cheaper, or even free? Open source is a laudable goal, but you need to rememeber that people have costs, and our economy is founded on the basis that people can expect to make a reasonable profit on their investment..
Whether the company is a single developer or has thousands of developers across every continent, they have staff to support, buildings to rent/purchase, heat and light. Their staff have families who need to eat, and they will have other costs. This all needs paying for, and if they don't make some profit, they won't have anything to invest in future products. I say some. Big corporations often make too much profit.
law mandating that end users be given access to the Source Code of any software they run on their machines
Any binary can be disassembled pretty easily. There you go... assembler source code for all your software. Have fun.
But any modified version won't match the digital signature, so you can't actually RUN it, of course.
This is the craziest of crazy ideas I've seen for quite a while.
In your world, nothing is protected from being plagiarised by your competitors. Most software businesses hang their existence on doing something few, or no one, else can do. Either - they believe - uniquely, or better than anyone else.
Forcing all software to publish its source code is the death of pretty much every software company. Forget copyright protections, they will take too long to have any preventative effect. It would come down to who has the deepest pockets, which favours large corporations over small innovators.
The parallel is those people who design and make stuff for their little market place and make a decent living, until a mega-corp nicks their most successful design and starts to flog it in their own high street low cost fashion outlet for a fraction of the cost..
Think of razors and razor blades, and game programs.
The game engine is the razor, and the playable content - the maps, character models, sounds, etc. - are the blades. You give away, or sell for low cost, the engine, and sell the proprietary content.
Id (game-maker company) has made millions using this model. It also leaves the door open for other companies to make their own, compatible, marketable content (maps, characters, and mods), and for fans to create and give away their own playable content, if that's what they choose to do.
Not all programs can fit into this model, but many can.
"The simplest solution would be a straightforward law mandating that end users be given access to the Source Code of any software they run on their machines and to which end, nothing in the Source Code is secret from the end user."
The problem with software is that it's not tangible. Giving away the schematics for a stereo receiver isn't a big deal since a DIY build would be much more expensive than buying one new. With software, the cost to make copies and alterations is very low while the expense to write a full application can be rather expensive.
There is one situation where requiring manufacturers to put their code in escrow would be good and that's for IoT and similar hardware/software systems since people might be making a fair size investment in the kit and then suddenly have it all become worthless when servers are turned off and it would be illegal for somebody to reverse engineer the system and offer a new service in support. I just watched a video on an underground survival bunker built from a disused missile silo. Each apartment had a Crestron media control panel and the complex had a comprehensive control system as well. If those became unsupported, the cost to replace them might be very significant. Of course, they need to be able to operate as a stand alone system for a survival bunker, but losing the ability to extend and upgrade would still be an issue. I think this was in Wyoming. The set up was very well done and I took away some ideas for off-grid features I'm trying to do at my own home. I'm not prepping for WWIII, but being able to not worry about the power being off is not a bad thing. My biggest hurdle is water. The city sources water from wells and has backup generators for the pumps, but I don't think they are set up for power outages more than a day or two.
It seems to have been like this for a while. discussion at GitHub Community
The github-actions bot has responded.
[Author here]
> If so much 3rd party code was in the repository
Hang on. I think you're making a big assumption here which for me ruins the joke. (It was a joke, right?)
"In the repository" -- *what* repository? What makes you think that they had a repository? Source repos are an element of a version control system. What makes you think they had one of those?
I think they probably had a big ol' Zip file, or a backup disk, or tape, or something like that, and some rookie staff member who doesn't know how Git works was told "put the source code on Github" and they tried.
Look, Microsoft *owns* GitHub, and when some staffer uploaded the rediscovered MS-DOS 4 source code:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/26/ms_dos_4_open_source/
... they screwed it up and did rookie mistakes like mixing up CR/LF versus LF line endings.
Git is horribly complicated, more than it needs to be for 99% of its users. Github adds an extra layer. It doesn't just need training: it needs deep knowledge and understanding. Most people using it do not have that.
Me included, and I did daily for over 4 years.
I strongly suspect a 20th century freeware proprietary Windows app had nothing like that. Maybe a shared network drive on an in-house server.
As a git user, it seems like you're getting pissed off at git behaving like a modern text editor and adapting to differences in line ending schemes in a way you don't like. mercurial's lack of faffing about with line endings sounds like a miserable hellhole where I'd have to constantly be auditing my codebase to ensure that nobody's accidentally committed a change that updates every line in a file to use a different EOL scheme. I'd much rather annotate my repository to point out binary files than have to live with that stress.
During the dark ages, typewriter carriages and platens hadn't been invented yet. Text editors in those days were probably more like an image editor, where the text wasn't actually a binary code meant to be interpreted and displayed as letters on a screen, but a visual representation of those letters instead, already displayed on a medium like parchment or a piece of rock.
svn also faffs around with line endings and it's also a complete pain in the arse because it's easier for the editor, commit, and update utilities to detect the line ending than getting people to set an svn flag saying what the line ending is. The proof is that svn ended up having auto properties so the "native" EOL flag is automatically set server side forcing EOL detection to be done on the client side.
Working in a multi-OS development, Git does it right. Otherwise there will be lots of commits which do nothing but change line endings when diffed. And CI chains which work fine, right up until a commit from a rare operating system. Githouses need to understand line endings somewhere -- either when the commit arrives, or when handling the code base, such as showing differences, annotating lines with the last change, etc. There's a lot more tooling than just editors. I'd rather than file mangling happen once at commit rather than in every item of tooling.
Regardless of whether it was a repo or not, they were apparently distributing GPL licensed code as a proprietary binary. Otherwise why would the code have been in the zip file or whatever?
Agreed about the complexity of Git and Github. For personal projects I sometimes use Fossil, but Git and Github are what everyone knows. I mostly use local tools as far as possible even when using Github so keeping it (or at least trying to keep it) to being just a place to host a repo.
> Otherwise why would the code have been in the zip file or whatever?
Um. Look, I try to avoid saying "have you read the article?" -- but: have you?
Do you think every copy of WinAmp included the Shoutcast _server_ in it? Hint: no, it didn't.
The whole point of the article is that what they shared _was not just the source of WinAmp_. That is what the article is about: that they mistakenly shared lots of other stuff that wasn't in fact part of the source code they were in fact _trying_ to share.
> Do you think every copy of WinAmp included the Shoutcast _server_ in it? Hint: no, it didn't.
Puzzling statement. The free server plugin was developed and maintained by the same owner (Radionomy now llama and as such SHOUTcast ) who now decided to release winamp source. Are there reasons to think this functionality contained 3rd party elements? Which ones?
Taking a company's source code and preparing it for release to the wild is not a simple process. I've been there, done that for OpenSTA
back in 2001.
IIRC, it involved checking the copyright of everything, removing author's names (some no longer worked for Cyrano, we didn't want people being bothered by support requests) and not least, removing any jokes or bad language from the comments.
I doubt it.
I suspect it started as a folder on a HD, migrated to CVS, then to SVN.....
Look, TBH, if they were that clueful in the first place, then this wouldn't have happened.
...then all the clueful people left. ;-)
(aside: I'm writing 'clueful' down.. and putting it in my special place for words like that).
There's idiot level tools and cut and paste guides on going from SVN to git.
(Aside: There's also much more complex tools that allow you to do the job properly).
One of the problems of the early microcomputer era was their "toy" status in the minds of their makers and in the minds of so many of their new-to-computing users. Important concepts were missing from microcomputer ecosystem for a long time.
Change control was one of these.
I remember EDIT decks from my mainframe days in uni. These were decks of cards (or lines in a file) which were manually-created source-file deltas. After you created your original source file, you'd create EDIT decks with commands such as, "DELETE LINES 17-33", "INSERT AT LINE 60/ INTEGER TRAILER", etc. Starting with your original source, you could "play back" a series of EDIT decks against your original source file to re-create any version of your program.
You could do the same thing by creating text files of commands and feeding them into MS-DOS EDLIN, but most new programmers did not. Instead, they directly edited their files using a "more-convenient" screen editor, such as MS-DOS EDIT.
The EDIT decks were not created by transcribing edits made in some other editor. The EDIT decks were the editing commands.
Source control -- whether via EDIT decks, SCCS, RCS, SVN, CVS, Monotone, Git, Mercurial, or whatever -- in no way guarantee "mistake-free code". They just guarantee you can accurately re-create Version X of your program, which is very useful in debugging.
In the end, I wish this had gone better. The no touch license made anything out of the gesture a non starter for pretty much anyone who could do anything with the project.
The third party source references made the personality even more murky. In the end, there's not much that can be done.
I wish there was a rough modern equivalent player that didn't suck. I didn't know that there is any such beast. It least not with anything that resemble the community and ubiquity of winamp at its peak.
For that matter, I'd like a good Linux version.
> I wish there was a rough modern equivalent player that didn't suck.
Foobar2000 is my audio player of choice on Windows, macOS and Android these days.
https://www.foobar2000.org/
By one of the co-authors of WinAmp, I believe.
Sadly, there is no Linux version and it's not FOSS.
On Windows I use Musicbee (https://www.getmusicbee.com) which can be skinned, takes plugins, and has a mini-player akin to WinAmp.
It's not ideal; I miss both the Coverflow browser of old iTunes, and the vinyl effects plugin I had on WinAmp (it would simulate dust, scratches, worn turntable belt etc). The former made browsing my music collection an experience like flipping through a physical record collection; the latter is harder for me to explain ("why would you want to make your music sound worse???") but it had its uses.
the latter is harder for me to explain ("why would you want to make your music sound worse???") but it had its uses.
'worse' is subjective, many people forget that.
Or to put it another way...
Objectively, CDs reproduce the recorded signal more accurately than vinyl. Yet the record player still exists, tube amps are still a thing, etc, etc...
Foobar200 got my main music player > 15 years ago, when winamp 2 failed to do "perfect continous play" between music titles.
Listening to the Flash Gordon CD ripped by myself and having audible gaps between titles ruins the experience. The whole album is a space opera, meant to be played in one go (OK two, since you had to turn the original vinyl record).
Aaaaahhh those memories...
"Klytus, I'm booored. What plaything can you offer me today?"
"An obscure body in the S-K System, Your Majesty."
Developers are still being forked. But then, Llamas are known for spitting in your face.
Which is what this amounts to: being expected to do the work but then hand it over without being allowed to distribute their own work was never going to get a lot of devs on board.
> So, then, what's the point?
The point is you don't get taken down or banned from GitHub.
A bit academic in hindsight, but there you go.
When I wrote this, the repo and the code was still there, making it easy to find the (literally) thousands of forks.
> Are they afraid somebody might take their baby and make a better version than they ever did?
Yes, I think exactly that.
Now, of course, legions of copies of the code are out there and perhaps new versions and ports will appear after all. With the names and serial numbers filed off.
I was trying to figure out what the difference is between a fork and a "modified version" and all I can think of is that they have to remove every reference to the name Winamp and then it becomes a fork. But I'm not a programmer of FOSS expert. It does seem like it doesn't matter one whit what their WCL said. They showed that they included GPL2 code so now anybody can do whatever they want with it according to the GPL2 terms (though the other code that Llama legitimately had no right to distribute is probably still off-limits).
If this did get forked/converted to FOSS, it would just end up like most other software of that nature: used by a few technologically-literate people, made ugly and hard to use in the name of giving users complete control and customizability so it can never get anywhere in mainstream use.
If that GPL2 code was linked, yes, maybe. If it was something else, that does not automatically apply GPL2 to the rest of it. It just indicates that they can't apply their proprietary license to those bits. For example, if that was a separate binary which they called to decode something, quite common in media players, their code is not covered by the GPL, explicitly or implicitly. If that code was included in the repo by mistake and isn't required to use it, not covered. Only if they took a GPLed library and included it directly in the application is the code of that application covered as well. Given that code for unrelated projects was coming through, the presence of that code in the repository is not enough to conclude that it covers the whole. You have to read the code to determine what part if any it touches.
I'd suggest that if the compiled binary for the application (ignoring other projects and material included in the repo that doesn't compile into it) contains anything that is compiled from GPL's source code that is included in the repo, then that GPL license applies to the whole. IANAL though, and I only get one lifetime to play with, so I'm not going to spend it reading and analysing the GPL license terms for fun.
It depends what you mean by "compiled binary". If you install WinAmp to C:\...\winamp, you have a few options:
1. C:\...\winamp\winamp.exe contains the GPLed code: license is supposed to apply to the whole thing
2. C:\...\winamp\somelibrary.dll contains the GPLed code and winamp.exe loads it: license is supposed to apply to the whole thing
3. C:\...\winamp\otherthing.exe contains the GPLed code, winamp.exe calls this: only otherthing.exe is covered. If otherthing.exe is a direct compilation of the GPL project, then there will be no new code at all, although they're supposed to tell you.
4. A DLL loaded by a separate process, see number 3.
We have the other option of
5. It wouldn't be installed at all. They just dropped it in by mistake.
In any git-based source control system (such as GitHub), and indeed pretty much any other source control system (how is Subversion doing these days? Anybody?), the word "fork" has a very specific and well-defined meaning. That will be almost certainly be the one they mean.
> They showed that they included GPL2 code
Er, no.
They included GPL2 code in the stuff they uploaded; that does NOT prove that WinAmp contained GPL2 code.
They accidentally included the source code of their proprietary audio streaming server as well. It is I think reasonably safe to conclude that did not form part of WinAmp.
That's not how the GPLv2 works. Including GPLv2 code does not automatically change the license of your own code.
Including GPLv2 code in a proprietary application, and then distributing that application, is copyright infringement. Whoever wrote that GPLv2 code can sue, and get damages and an injunction against further distribution. Just like if someone stole some proprietary source code and used it.
Now, the copyright holder could settle out of court. And might agree to do that if you GPL'd your own code and paid their legal costs. Or they might not. Up to the two parties involved to negotiate a mutually acceptable outcome.
If you want to avoid copyright infringement, then one option is to relicense your proprietary software as GPLv2 before you distribute it. But that would have to be your own choice. And once you've infringed the copyright, it's too late - you lose your rights under the GPLv2 and can never use that GPLv2 code again unless the copyright owner gives you special permission.
> Any mass-market proprietary software project this old is likely to contain lots of parts from other companies, if only so that it could interoperate.
Llama Group SA is valued (today) at €15M. There must still be companies out there that have some of their code inside WinAmp. With documented source available as evidence, law suites should be a doddle for carving up the 15 million. Maybe even have a bash at Maxximum S.A. (> €1B) which is the majority holder of Llama Group .
I've always assumed that was a Jeff Minter reference, given that he has a thing for camelids.
Maybe ask Jeff?
https://www.polygon.com/23613576/jeff-minter-profile-akka-arrh-atari-llamasoft-arcade
"Very few companies own and have distribution rights to 100% of their sources."
Yes, that's what makes it very, very hard to open source anything but the smallest of commercial/proprietary projects. There's also the risk of copyright or patent infringements popping up either unexpectedly because the devs didn't know or through deliberate re-use of other commercially protected code a dev put in years ago and either forgot about or has long since left the company/project.
If you're running a software-creating business and you aren't tracking licensing at even a FILE level, especially for things you've PAID for licensing for, you have far bigger problems that what happens if you want to open source.
And I've seen plenty of releases from studios where it's just "and this file isn't included because it's proprietary" and then the community builds an open-source shim around those functions or rewrites the parts that are missing using something else entirely. (Things like games using EAX or PhysX or Miles Sound System, etc.).
But you have no source control whatsoever if you don't even have the licenced portions of your products separated into folders with the relative licensing associated with them (in comments or a separate file).
The days of "oh, we just kept it all on a floppy and nobody cared about the licensing" are so far gone it's laughable.
And if you've ever licenced anything ever, I guarantee that licensor occasionally looks at your programs to see if you're still using their code.
Apparently one Winamp is worth one-tenth of one US penny. I'm not even sure if there is such a thing as a Winamp (only this site lists it) but they apparently were trying to do NFTs at one point. Seems like an appropriate price though for one copy of the software.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/winamp/usd
I can foresee absolutely no problem with feeding someone else's proprietary and copyrighted code into an "AI" LLM, trusting that it will remove anything problematic, and not use any of the copyrighted material for its own training model. None whatsoever.
> I can foresee absolutely no problem with feeding someone else's proprietary and copyrighted code into an "AI" LLM, trusting that it will remove anything problematic, and not use any of the copyrighted material for its own training model.
Excellent plan. I endorse this.
Let's do it with Windows 95 and see what comes out the end.
Unless of course the answer to that is "Windows ME".
I think it is a very bad idea to give the Winamp folk a hard time for releasing their source-code in any kind of context. This bad rap will likely scare off future companies from doing the same. If people don't like something, perhaps just file a polite bug request in future. Don't turn this political. Don't turn this into a witch hunt.
The fact they had some GPL 2.0 code in there and witheld the source code is naughty, yes but lets be honest, I imagine 25%+ of proprietary code does similar and from much larger money-grabbing companies.
Cleaning up a codebase for release is a huge and difficult task,
That part's certainly true. Open-sourcing a project after the fact is always more difficult than just starting it in the open right from the beginning. Without the scrutiny of their code being public, developers (whether independent or corporate) tend to cut corners and do a poor job of managing their dependencies properly and in accordance with the licenses they were obtained under (assuming everything they're using was even legitimately obtained to begin with).
and if you're about to give the code away, that probably means it's not worth anything to you any more.
This statement, on the other hand, is painfully out of touch with both the commercial software industry and the open-source movement.
Source code, itself, is worth a lot less than you'd imagine, even for commercial applications. People don't buy source code. (Heck, these days they increasingly don't even buy software, but that's another discussion.) And open-sourcing code doesn't make it "worthless", in fact it can greatly increase the value of the applications based on that code. Ask Mozilla. Open-sourcing (what was then) Netscape saved their business. And proved worth it in the long run, despite the initial efforts going not much better than WinAmp's first attempt.
So why spend good money on paying your staff for the time it takes to clean it up?
Well, if you're serious about opening up your code, you spend good money cleaning it up because (a) you have to, if it's going to be subjected to public scrutiny — that's just table stakes for an open-source project, and the reason why it's a lot harder to do after-the-fact; (b) because all of that work is technical debt that accrued over the closed-source lifetime of the project, and in all likelihood was gonna have to be paid down someday regardless (even if it stayed closed-source); and (c) because an open, well-maintained codebase with hundreds, if not thousands, of eyes on it will ultimately lead to better code, and therefore better software. And better software is ultimately worth more than buggy, sloppy piles of outdated spaghetti code that's been slapped together in secret.
...Like I said, that's if you're serious about open-sourcing a project. Remains to be seen whether the LLamas really are, and just need to regroup and do better on their second try, or if this was all just a bit of theater they staged, hoping to slow their product's inexorable descent into total irrelevance.
You are right that open sourcing isn't only done when you no longer care about the code. However, it is one of two main times when someone considers open sourcing something they previously considered proprietary. Usually, these are the following:
1. They want more work done on it for their use of it and are willing to give up revenue to get that.
2. They no longer want to support it, and people who still use it are asking for it to be open sourced.
This problem doesn't much affect branch 1, but it is quite limiting for branch 2. I was talking with a company a while ago who in spirit was willing to open source something which I would help to manage afterward, but, even without doing a code review which, given the code's age, wasn't likely, they didn't want to spend the time checking out the legal situation. The code had been inherited from a previous company which had been acquired, and that company got some of it from a university project, so it would have taken some time to check whether the university still owned any of it. The project concerned was in the 1980s and wasn't used elsewhere, so it was pretty obvious that nobody at the university would actually care, but the legal side doesn't really work on the basis of nobody caring. The code is still unavailable today.
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My current music player, a Raspberry Pi that's plugged into a very nice, but very old amplifier, runs Audacious. It's a descendant of XMMS, which was written as a Linux look-alike of WinAmp. Although it's not a feature I use, I believe that Audacious still supports WinAmp skins, including the Windows bitmap graphics.
"Never mind the llama, the cat is no longer in the remote geographical vicinity of the bag."
Schrödinger would be proud of the quantum antics his eponymous moggy's offspring.
This Llama outfit must be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Blackadder conglomerate with the Llama C suite solely consisting of Balderick as this fiasco has the grimy finger prints of one of his "cunning plans" all over it.
I do recall well over ten years ago QNX being open sourced for a (very )short while. I have no idea how they managed to put that cat back in the bag.
>Any mass-market proprietary software project this old is likely to contain lots of parts from other companies, if only so that it could interoperate. Cleaning up a codebase for release is a huge and difficult task, and if you're about to give the code away, that probably means it's not worth anything to you any more. So why spend good money on paying your staff for the time it takes to clean it up?
The unfortunate truth. It'd be great to get the code for e.g. the Presto (Opera) and EdgeHTML browser engines or OS/2 or AmigaOS, but it won't happen because of third-party code.
A former staff member at the Llama Group has commented over at Hackaday. It was, they claim, their idea, but the company has laid off almost all the original staff including the remaining WinAmp developers.
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/16/winamp-taken-down-too-good-for-this-open-source-world/
I think, the comment at Hackaday is a quote, not the original comment.
I've been using Winamp in its various incarnations for, well, decades -- I really don't know for how long. I just assumed that it, like all other music players, consisted of a bit that integrated various Codecs to play audio files of various sorts and a bit that cataloged and prepared the lists of files to be played. The only problem is that it, being for 'media', attracts all sorts who feel that it should be a vehicle for continuing income so they'll keep fiddling with it, 'owning' bits of it and generally trying to monetize it. Which will run it.
I went through something similar with phone based music players. I have files that I want to play. Many phones ago that's exactly what I could do -- there was an application on the phone that would play files through Bluetooth onto the car audio. Not a big deal. Then I upgraded my very old and tired phone. Getting music player for that that wasn't sliced, diced, monetized, subscribed and generally messed around was a nightmare. Two phones later I found something that's back to normal......but why? All this technology was well known a quarter century ago.
Winamp itself these days is "NCV" -- "No Commercial Value". It still works, of course, except that now I've moved to Linux I don't really need Windows anything any more.
There was a discussion about releasing the code 20 years ago, and this was why they (the winamp folks) said that they'd never be able to release it as it has so many different proprietary parts they couldn't release and it wouldn't work without them.... so, surprise... they were telling the truth. This is just another "wow coke and icecream taste great--surely I'm the first one to invent the coke float!"
Quote: "...You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version..."
On my suburban street there is a 30MPH speed limit.
But the local Masters of the Universe in AMG Mercs and M-Series BMWs typically traverse the street at 70MPH!!!!
I just love it when "licence holders" and "Westmister lawmakers" talk about "what the law allows and forbids".
The law is one thing.....but it is a joke when there is NO ENFORCEMENT..........
.......and there never is any enforcement...................NO BUDGET....NO RESOURCES.............
-- Big data aggregators getting into trouble with GDPR??.................
-- Water companies getting into trouble for egregious sewage discharges??........
-- Members of the House of Lords getting into trouble over dodgy government contracts??.......
......and on and on and on....................
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