For a long time, the rumor persisted that classic Winamp would become a free and open source application. In the last few hours we have confirmed that the rumor is… more or less real: Yes, the legacy Winamp code was published on GitHub, but the terms of its license completely prohibit the distribution of modified versions. If anyone thinks about creating a special, super-personalized edition of the player… they will have to do it privately.
Winamp was not only “the” MP3 player that millions of users grew up with. It also served as a creative outlet thanks to its skins, and that developed to such a high level that today they have their own museum. Personally, I don't have a copy of Winamp installed, but I do use the portable version of QMMP with a Winamp skin on top, and the experience is virtually identical.
What do I mean by all this? That we always keep the radar on, waiting for some official news from Winamp… and we registered a blip in the last few hours. A GitHub profile called WinampDesktop published what appears to be the code of version 5.9.2 of the classic Winamp. Now, anyone would be celebrating at this point… but the truth is we’ve spent an entire day debating the details of its license.
Winamp and the ambiguity of “source available”
In section 4, item 1 of the Winamp Collaborative License version 1.0.1, we discover that the user can contribute optimizations and bug fixes to the project. These contributions must be sent to the official repository for later evaluation, and will be incorporated at discretion.
However, section 5, item 1 completely prohibits the distribution of modified versions of the software, whether code or binary packages. The right to share official versions and their mods remains under the control of the repository maintainers.
A part of the Web interpreted this as “no forks”, but it's not a confusion: The original version of the license clearly prohibited the action of forking: “No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.” If we can't create forks, how do we share modifications? The situation reached such absurd levels that a user proposed opening issues in the repository, and publishing the code through the comments.
With the updated license, the repository already has almost 800 forks, but the original conditions remain intact: Anyone interested can use, modify, and study the code, as long as they do it in a private setting. Modifying it to run on a 386 inside a personal retrocomputing laboratory, yes. Sharing that modification in a ready-to-use package called “RetroAmp386”, no.
I think it's a shame. From a historical point of view, the preservation of the code is “sufficient”, but users want to do more. I hope it evolves, and becomes truly “free and open source”, soon.
Link to the project: Click here
