- Joined
- Sep 15, 2021
Final bit of tech drama I'm repooosting from the Open Source Thread, this time concerning Winamp
Winamp of Winamp 2.95 fame recently open sourced their music player, You might be ecstatic that your favorite program from Windows XP will be maintained by the community and get better and bett... STOP, Just check out this license. Here's some interesting snippets:
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4. Contributions
- Contribution to Project: You are encouraged to contribute improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes back to the project. Contributions must be submitted to the official repository and will be reviewed and incorporated at the discretion of the maintainers.
5. Restrictions
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- No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
- No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.
- Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.
You might wonder, how for project hosted on GitHub, a developer is both supposed to be encouraged to contribute AND prohibited from making a fork. Just this line skyrocketed the repo's fork counter to 234 (as of posting and still counting). Additionally, a clause like this is against GitHub ToS. (For uninitiated, providing contributions on GH requires a fork) But that's not the best part.
The best part is by releasing WinAmps source code they accidentally leaked:
If you ever wondered what happened to Winamp after NullSoft, they got bought by AOL and later by Radionomy and Targetspot (Ad company), which it's CEO said he had great plans for WinAmp, mainly making it a Web Client and a music NFT marketplace.
- Commercial, non-distributable libraries (Mainly Qt, haven't look much into that myself)
- Dolby's proprietary and confidential AACplus library
- Source code of SHOUTcast3, their own paid internet radio streaming software
Edit: If it makes you sad, consider using WACUP, community patches to base Winamp instead.
Please tone it down, I don't want Winamp to regret opensourcing
Licence violates github TOS
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