Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
As expected, Winamp's source code has been publicly released on GitHub. The Winamp for Windows project, as it's officially called by Llama Group, will receive a few updates per year, adding new features and ensuring proper security practices. Just don't get your hopes up about creating alternative projects from this "freely" available code.
Llama Group is looking to the GitHub community for help in developing new capabilities and maintaining (or even modernizing) a codebase that dates back several decades. Originally introduced in 1997, Winamp has long been praised for its flexibility and broad compatibility with various audio formats.
[...] Winamp's source code is now freely available, but the license it was released under has sparked controversy. The Winamp Collaborative License imposes significant restrictions on what people can do with the code, including a ban on releasing modified third-party modified versions. The license explicitly states that no public forks are permitted, and only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to release the software or any new (approved) modifications.
Llama Group appears eager to benefit from community contributions to Winamp, but the software itself cannot be repurposed to create something new. Despite the legal threat, developers are undeterred, with hundreds of "unofficial" forks of Winamp's source code already surfacing online. As time goes on, this trend is only expected to grow.
Legal concerns aside, it seems clear that Llama Group no longer wants the full responsibility of maintaining the still-popular PC media player. The company has shifted its focus to different business ventures, including cloud-based products that leverage the "Winamp" brand to capitalize on music creators and streaming services.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Monday September 30, @09:29AM (6 children)
Been using it since the 90s. Never had to mess with codecs or drivers to get it to work. I have no idea how it still works, either, when all the other programs I used stopped being compatible a long time ago. Does everything I want, too. Best mp3/music player in the history of media players. Rolls up and says above all other windows, in that little space at the top, while still having easy controls to hit to start/stop/skip. Best library/search function. Can also hook it up to the microwave and create a time machine.
One of those well made things that just work without needed updates. Hard to improve perfection.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Unixnut on Monday September 30, @10:14AM (3 children)
I have to agree there, I used it for years back in the 90s while I was still a Windows user. When I switched to Linux they did release an Alpha version of Winamp3 but never carried on. I tried running it on wine but it didn't work too well for me. Then I discovered XMMS [wikipedia.org] which replicated the look and feel of Winamp2, complete with Winamp2 skin support and that was enough for me to switch (I did miss some of the visualisation plugins though).
Nowadays I use Audacious [wikipedia.org] which also supports winamp2 skins, thereby highlighting how thoroughly Winamp2 defined an era of what a computer music player interface should be. I tried loads of other software (including the native Audacious interface), none of which ever came close to the original Winamp2 interface.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 30, @12:29PM
Try Strawberry:
https://strawberrymusicplayer.org/ [strawberrymusicplayer.org]
https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/ [github.com]
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday September 30, @11:25PM
I use mpv in Windows and Linux. Its UI is plain black but I’m used to the keyboard shortcuts now (pause, skip fwd/back 30s/1m, next/back etc), and it plays everything. Fast as well.
(Score: 1) by HyperQuantum on Wednesday October 02, @12:52AM
I have used many different music players throughout the years: XMMS, Audacious, Amarok, Clementine, and maybe some others I forgot about. But I eventually decided to create my own from scratch:
https://github.com/hyperquantum/PMP [github.com]
It is client-server, only supports two formats (MP3 and FLAC), but it serves my needs and slowly gains new features over time (when I have time to work on it).
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 01, @02:07AM
Likewise. Still use v2.9 for everyday, and it still works on Win11.
It's simple, it only does what it's told, it doesn't get in my way, it doesn't eat much, and I don't have to fight my way through a rat's nest of "new features" just to do the same thing I've done with it since it first came to me bundled with Netscape 3. I don't want a library, or an organizer, or anything but play what I tell you, save and load the playlist when I ask for it. That's it.
Qmmp on linux is close.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by suxen on Tuesday October 01, @07:13AM
Winamp is the only media player I've ever found with a decent randomisation algorithm that doesn't result in me listening to the same 10 songs out of a playlist of thousands everyday 13 times a day. I don't know what it is but it just works so much better. For me it's the entire purpose of the wine project, to be able to use it on Linux. Would love it if someone could release a linux native version
(Score: 5, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday September 30, @09:52AM (3 children)
What a timeshare presentation is to an invitation to a cocktail party.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Monday September 30, @10:25AM
And shows how far Winamp has fallen since it was originally created by Nullsoft [wikipedia.org] and Justin Frankel [wikipedia.org], who invented the Gnutella peer-to-peer network as well. I would image that had Justin still had ownership of the IP he would have open sourced it properly years ago.
I don't really see the point of open sourcing Winamp with these restrictions. There are other media players that already support winamp2 skins. Perhaps it allows people to have a peek at the winamp3 skinning engine which may give them ideas for their own implementations for other media players.
At best it would improve third party support for winamp5 skins and plugins. I guess if someone finds a bug and is willing to fix it themselves rather than wait they can contribute, but beyond that it seems the project will stagnate.
It is a shame, as we can see by buzz around the code release, Winamp is still well known and popular.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday September 30, @12:25PM
Why do you have to come down on their lawyers so much? Just because they've combined all the downsides of open source to users with none of the benefits? But their PR flaks used all the right buzzwords, why do you have to burst their bubble?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Tuesday October 01, @01:32PM
From what I've heard, locking yourself in a room with a bunch of strangers that are using high pressure sales tactics to get you, is a horrible idea.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Monday September 30, @02:11PM (1 child)
This highlights a problem that I hadn't really noticed. We've let "Open Source" become synonymous with "Free", and they should not be. It creates an obstacle for people that want to be transparent or want to accept community contributions without losing control of their code. The backlash and illegal forking that WinAmp has here is a strong disincentive to opening source on existing applications.
(Score: 2, Funny) by ntc on Monday September 30, @08:12PM
I agree. To me, "open source" used to mean that the source code could be copied, with the goal of making that software available to as many people/companies as possible. It doesn't attempt to give end users any freedoms.
If you want to give end-users freedoms, don't use an open source license, use a Free Software (copy-left) license.
They are very different, with different goals.
However, from what I've read here, the new WinAmp license isn't Free Software nor Open Source. If it were open source, I could take the code, and use it within my own product. "Open Source" does NOT only mean that the source code is published for other to inspect.
Comparing it to "free as in freedom", this license is "open as in zipper". You can look, but you can't touch ;-)
(Score: 4, Informative) by looorg on Monday September 30, @03:38PM (2 children)
I still use it on Windows. Version 2.95, which is really old compared to the latest stable version. But it's the last known good version before it became bad and bloated. The entire directory with plugins, software, skins is less then a floppy disk in size unpacked. No bloat. No weird extras or other crud I don't need or want. Just doing what it's supposed to do. Play music.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday September 30, @11:28PM (1 child)
Agree, version 3 went downhill but I think it was still decent. Then version 5 was unusable. All that online library streaming rubbish.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 01, @02:11AM
v5 can be beaten into lookiing and behaving like v2.x; v3.0 cannot be, far as I ever got with hit.
But it's just easier to use v2.9x, and I still do.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by digitalaudiorock on Monday September 30, @03:44PM (4 children)
This all makes me appreciate my minimalist approach to this.
I've recently gotten back into CD ripping (and buying new CDs for that purpose) and have started ripping CDs to flac format from a command line using abcde [einval.com] and playing them (also from a command line) using cmus [github.com]. To hell with all that bloat, the GUI, all the unnecessary fan art etc etc...loving this approach and can't say enough about either program.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Monday September 30, @04:12PM (2 children)
Nice, I have to give a +1 for abcde, it is what I use for mass ripping of my collection, all stored and tagged as FLAC. I use flac2all to convert that to lossy formats when needed (although with the growth in space and increase in general flac support I need to do that less and less).
Good that you can buy CD's still, most of the shops stopped selling CDs around here years ago, I bought a huge amount of CDs at second hand markets in the last few years (so many I still have not got round to ripping them all) but it does feel like it is harder to get a hold of CD's as time goes by, especially of newer music.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday October 01, @02:14AM (1 child)
I no longer know where to buy music.
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 01, @01:46PM
Well, for CDs I go to charity shops and markets near universities. The former because often people decide to dump their old CD collection to charities as they can't be bothered selling off the CDs themselves, and the latter because at graduation many students leave behind a lot of stuff in their dorms. There are people that are paid to collect all this for disposal, who usually sort it into things to sell and things to just throw away. These people then rent a stall in the local marketplace and resell the stuff, sometimes to new student arrivals.
However both those sources have been dwindling. Once people donate their collection to charity they don't buy new CDs but stream/download, and the newer students likewise stream/download so they don't leave behind much in CDs.
Also logically a lot of the CDs are of older stuff, I've not come across a single CD from the 2020s onwards. At this point I don't actually know where I can buy non-DRM lossless music I want, so I've resorted to downloading stuff off youtube. Its not lossless but better than nothing.
(Score: 2) by corey on Monday September 30, @11:30PM
Haven’t used cmus yet, thanks for the tip. Like I said above, mpv is very good at playing audio and video too, and has good keyboard shortcuts. I also use abcde. I use mpv to rip DVDs to x264/265.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday October 01, @03:12AM
That's all this is about:
===
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.
Assignment of Rights: By submitting contributions, you agree that all intellectual property rights, including copyright, in your contributions are assigned to Winamp. You hereby grant Winamp a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, and distribute your contributions as part of the software, without any compensation to you.
Waiver of Rights: You waive any rights to claim authorship of the contributions or to object to any distortion, mutilation, or other modifications of the contributions.
===
You get to give them code, they get to keep it. They still get to blame you for any bugs.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by jb on Tuesday October 01, @06:40AM
...as the license clearly violates Freedoms 2 and 3.
...and it's not open source either, as it violates the OSD's Criteria 1 and 3 (and maybe also 2 and/or 10, but those not as clear cut).
So much for "freely available".
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Tuesday October 01, @06:54AM
I agree with all those comments here stating why this is NOT open source. But, in all fairness, nowhere in TFA does it claim to be open source. It is explicitly released under its own license, presumably in the hope that some people will actually do work for the Llama Group without having any rights to even use their own efforts to release a fork of the program.
I see this as a slightly deceptive move by Llama Group to get something for nothing while leaving the people doing the work with no rights whatsoever, nor will they be recompensed in any way for the time they spend writing enhancements and bug fixes.
I am glad that there are 'hundreds of "unofficial" forks of Winamp's source code' already appearing. I hope that this attempt will have the exact opposite effect than that hoped for by the Group. Perhaps, eventually, they will get the message; that is not how the system works.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday October 01, @06:26PM
Has anyone ported it to Linux? I still use a very old copy in Windows.
Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry