A few days ago the source code for the popular Winamp music player was released into the world, with as we reported at the time, a licence that left a lot to be desired. Since then it seems some of the criticism has caught up with the company, for not only have they modified their terms to allow forking, they’ve reacted to a bunch of claimed GPL violations by removing offending files. Perhaps How-To-Geek are right in describing it all as an absolute mess.

The forking amendment means that with luck we’ll start seeing a few modified players descending from the Winamp code, and it seems that the GPL violations are more embarrassing technicalities than show-stoppers, but we have to wornder whether or not this makes for something with any more than historical interest. Perhaps its value stands in a lesson for corporate entities in how not to release their source, which sadly we expect will be taken by other organisations as an excuse not to do so.

If you’re following the Winamp source code saga you can read our coverage from when it came out. It will be interesting to see where this story goes.

The 1990s seem to have reached that point at which they are once more considered cool, and ephemera of the decade has become sought-after. One of the unlikely software hits from the period was Winamp, the MP3 player of choice in an era when time spent on dodgy file sharing sites or peer to peer sharing would snag you almost any music you wanted. Decades later its interface is still widely copied, but now you can try the original again as its source code has been made available. It’s not what we’d call open source though, even though they seem to be making an effort to imply as much with phrases such as “opening up its source code“.

If you’d like to have a go with it you can snag a copy from this GitHub repository, and you’ll need a particular version of Visual Studio 2019 to build it. Any celebrations will be muted though by paragraph five of the Winamp Collaborative License, which prohibits distribution of modified versions or forks, and stipulates that only the official maintainers can distribute it. This doesn’t sound like open source to us, indeed it seems they’re just looking for community maintenance for free, which probably isn’t too surprising from a brand which went all-out to join the NFT bandwagon a couple of years ago.

So have a look for nostalgia’s sake if you want, but we’d suggest going for something more community driven if you want to do anything with it.

Header: Christiaan Colen, CC BY-SA 2.0.