Open-sourcing of WinAmp 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 is still around: the audio player of choice for the Napster generation. You know, folks who are in their 40s now and are starting to get middle-aged presbyopia. If they remove their new reading glasses, it might make some of the many skins in the WinAmp Skin Museum look rather better.

Peer-to-peer downloads of MP3s are just a tad passé now, but don't panic: there's a WinAmp web player as well, and mobile apps. Better still, it fulfilled a long-felt want upon which The Register reported over a decade ago.

Owners Llama Group relaunched the venerable Windows media player back in 2023. And then a few months ago in May, the company announced that later in 2024 it would release the source code, too. As promised, it did so in September - and that of quite a few other products as well. Whoops.

The source code release - prior to the deletion yesterday - has been a somewhat bumpy ride. The initial release had a custom license, the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0, containing the clause:

Some GitHub users quickly noted (in comments since deleted when the repo was) that this violates GitHub's terms of service. As Hackaday noted, that meant it wasn't really open source. Original co-developer Justin Frankel was extremely skeptical:

The company responded (pre-deletion) by revising the WCL to create version 1.0.1, which permits forking but prevents distribution of modified versions.

Whether this could be enforced is hard to say. Also inside the uploaded source code was some GPL 2 source code, which renders the not-very-open WCL moot.

There were other goodies in there, too. Some have a shared heritage. For instance, Nullsoft, the original authors of WinAmp, created other tools as well. One of those was early audio streaming service Shoutcast, which also ended up part of AOL.

The WinAmp source code on GitHub additionally included a copy of the server code of Shoutcast Distributed Network Audio Server (DNAS), too.

We don't think the company intended to share that - partly because it's no longer Llama Group's to publish. That was part of Radionomy, a part of the business it sold off to Azerion in 2022. Although the company attempted to remove that, this is trickier than it sounds on Github and didn't work (according to a since-deleted comment).

There was also some Intel and Microsoft source code in there as well, noted prior to the deletion. It's fair to say that it was quite a mixed bag. Pandora would be proud. Of course, in the case of Pandora's jar, the problem was that once opened, it could not be closed again. Since the WinAmp license was changed to allow forking, the code was forked thousands of times. Never mind the llama, the cat is no longer in the remote geographical vicinity of the bag.

We have asked Winamp platform owner Llama Group for comment about the copyright issues and will update this article if it responds.

Re-phrasing one of Oscar Wilde's utterances, PT Barnum said: "There's no such thing as bad publicity." If so, the open sourcing of WinAmp has brought plenty of fresh interest to an old Windows app.

While the release has been rather entertaining, the restrictive license means it's not much use to anyone. But it does serve as an example, both of how not to do this sort of thing, but also and more sadly, of why most companies tend not to do so. 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?

It's worse when none of the original staff are still involved. The aforementioned co-developer Frankel, who also created file-sharing app Gnutella, left the company over 20 years ago. His subsequent company Cockos develops the Reaper digital audio workstation.

There are no easy answers. Perhaps some benefactor could fund legal indemnities for a group of programmers who could volunteer their services in identifying and removing legally tricky inclusions. It would be a great learning experience. It might even be a useful application for LLM bot-based "AI" tools. ®