Winamp really whips open source coders into frenzy with its source release

Winamp wanted to engage coders, but not like this.

It's been a while since most of us used or just thought about Winamp. But now there is a whole lot going on with the MP3 player of yore, mostly due to a remarkably chaotic source code release.

As previously announced, Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, provided "the Legacy Player Code" on September 24 so that developers could "contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve."

The code was made available, but not very open. Under the "Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1," you may not "distribute modified versions of the software" in source or binary, and "only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications." Anyone may contribute, in other words, but only to Winamp's benefit.

Despite how this license would seem to bar forks, or perhaps because of that, the code has been forked at least 2,600 times as of this writing. In forking and examining the source when first released, coders have noticed some, shall we say, anomalies:

• Large portions of other projects' code, offered under other, more robust licenses, were seemingly included (if later deleted) from Winamp's repository
• The original Winamp code may have leaked the source code for SHOUTcast server software
• In seeking to remove offending files with a simple deletion instead of a rebase, Winamp kept it available to those who know Git mechanics
• Proprietary packages from Intel and Microsoft were also seemingly included in the release's build tools

As people in the many, many busy GitHub issue threads are suggesting, coding has come a long way since the heyday of the Windows-98-era Winamp player, and Winamp seems to have rushed its code onto a platform it does not really understand.

Winamp flourished around the same time as illegal MP3 networks such as Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa, providing a more capable means of organizing and playing deeply compressed music with incorrect metadata. After a web shutdown in 2013 that seemed inevitable in hindsight, Winamp's assets were purchased by a company named Radionomy in 2014, and a new version was due out in 2019, one that aimed to combine local music libraries with web streaming of podcasts and radio.

Winamp did get that big update in 2022, though the app was "still in many ways an ancient app," Ars' Andrew Cunningham wrote then. There was support for music NFTs added at the end of 2022.

In its press release for the code availability, the Brussels-based Llama Group SA, with roughly 100 employees, says that "Tens of millions of users still use Winamp for Windows every month." It plans to release "two major official versions per year with new features," as well as offering Winamp for Creators, intended for artists or labels to manage their music, licensing, distribution, and monetization on various platforms.

Source

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