Winamp Open Source Story Is Over: A lesson in what open source actually is

In the last five months, Winamp, the iconic music player from the recent past, has been on quite a journey. It started with exciting news, which caused great enthusiasm, but sadly, things didn’t turn out well in the end. Without warning, Winamp deleted its entire GitHub repository, effectively ending the whole story around open-sourcing the music player code.

Clearly, the organisation had no clue what open source is actually about. The right to fork, modify, etc is all enshrined within open source.

The linked article unpacks a little of how that all went wrong.

See https://linuxiac.com/winamp-open-source-story-is-over

#technology #opensource #music

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

The code is still out there though, right? I mean, once they put out an OSS version, there’s no backsies.

It may well have been copied but the license attached prohibited any changes or modification. So legally you could only use it was freeware really.

Oh I see, lame

VLC!

Free Software.

Yes not open source also source was available to view