The legacy media player, Winamp, has gone open source. But the license has been criticized by the open-source community.
A few months ago, Llama Group SA, the company that owns Winamp, announced its intention to release the source code for Winamp on September 24. That's exactly what happened.
Winamp's source code is now available on GitHub
The source code that has been released belongs to the classic version of the music player. The license document, which you can view on Winamp's website Official GitHub pageThe title is “Winamp Companion License (WCL)”. It doesn't feel good, does it?
(Image courtesy: Winamp)
Is Winamp open source? No, absolutely not
If you scroll down the page to section 4, the license says the following.
Basically, it seems they want people to come in, look at the code, fix bugs for them, and wait for the maintainers to review them. This means developers can reject changes or features, so there's not a lot of freedom for improvement.
The license also states that all intellectual property rights and copyrights relating to the contribution are assigned to Winamp. The contributor must waive any rights of authorship, or object to changes made to the contribution. This in turn gives Winamp the full right to use your contribution without any compensation to the person contributing the code. This forced “waiver of rights” is illegal in many countries, including Belgium, where Llama Group SA is based.
Do you understand this? This is basically unpaid work, and only the official app gets the features/improvements. The person contributing does not have any kind of freedom. Almost every user who responded to the announcement X(Twitter)He's angry, and rightfully so.
And it gets even worse in section 5. Restrictions (see screenshot above).
So, contributors cannot distribute modified versions of Winamp, even in source code format. Only the maintainer, i.e. the company itself, can do so. It's a bizarre license. Other developers would not be allowed to create their own version of Winamp and distribute it. So, it's not open source? That's what it seems. Why bother releasing the source code? If it was a PR move, it's a disaster. Here's something funny, they”included by mistake” He replaced the source code for the Shoutcast server software with that of Winamp, but then removed it.
Winamp updated the license to allow forking, but…
What happened? Winamp's license was violated GitHub Terms of ServiceWhich says: “By setting your repository to be publicly viewable, you agree to allow others to view and “fork” your repository (this means that others can make their own copies of the content from your repository in repositories they control).” Discussion More about it on Winamp's GitHub.
Company Edited licensing The update (WCL 1.0.1) allows forking the code, but only for private use, i.e. you are still not allowed to distribute your custom versions that have been modified. Well, at the time of writing this article there are almost 1000 forks of Winamp's source code, so this is some good news.
DrO, the manufacturer of Walkup (Winamp Community Update Project) criticized the company's licensing restrictions redditand also published a statement about it WACUP's Facebook pageThey said they would not use the source code for their version of the music player.
What do you think about this?
Thanks for reading..
