Winamp's restrictive code release stifles community innovation
As promised a few months ago, the source code for Winamp has been published. However, this does not make the legendary player open-source software. A restrictive and problematic licence has been applied, making it difficult to work with the project.
When Llama Group, the owner of Winamp, announced that the legendary MP3 player's source code would be made public, concerns immediately arose. The organization then informed, in a rather chaotic announcement, that Winamp would not become free software or an open-source project. Forking and redistribution would be prohibited.
Despite these restrictions, a community was expected to form around the project to provide (for free) fixes and new features. Llama Group's internal decisions would determine whether any of them could be integrated into the program. The ban on forking means that someone's work—if not accepted—simply goes to waste.
How to work with this?
It's not possible to work like this on GitHub. Software maintained as a GH repository is almost by definition developed by forking and submitting a pull request to the main repository. It is also possible to deliver patches using the Issues mechanism, but this contradicts good practices, developer experience, and (in the opinion of many) common sense.
Developing code in such a complicated way, in addition to the uncertainty that it won't be discarded, is discouraging. So much so that the May announcement was considered a poorly written teaser by someone not necessarily well-versed in software engineering. It was assumed that the September publication of the code would take place under much more reasonable terms.
However, this will not be the case. Moreover, it is even worse than expected from the unfortunate announcement three months ago. Indeed, the Winamp source code licence (Llama Group decided to write its own) prohibits forking and secondary distribution. The interpretation depends on its rigour.
The ban's core probably concerns creating your own versions under the same name. However, an orthodox interpretation simply prohibits forking, which makes community-driven project development impossible. This was immediately reported as a problem. Even though it was known from the start that this would be an issue.
More setbacks
But that's not the end of the problems. The licence describes the project as "copyleft" (which has a strictly defined legal meaning), and then very quickly contradicts itself, prohibiting secondary distribution. One user described the actual licence as "copywrong" (the opposite of "copyright"), which is a colloquial term for a regulation maliciously hindering copying and creating derivative works. There is also suspicion that this licence is inconsistent with Belgian law (at least).
However, the biggest blunder in the repository is undoubtedly the publication of a fragment of the AacPlus library source code and Vlb code, which is… closed software licensed by Dolby. Llama Group does not have the right to publish it. The code has already been removed from the repository, but it still exists in the history before the commit 1be0403.
Not to mention that it is in the history of forks—those that the licence prohibits. Due to being directly based on work on forks, GitHub does not block them. When writing this text, the repository has already been forked 303 times. It remains an open question whether pull requests from such forks have a chance of being integrated into the main Winamp.
Despite three months of preparations, the publication of the Winamp code was highly unprofessional, and none of the known licencing problems were resolved. The lack of understanding of their licences and the inability to properly use the GitHub platform undermines the technical and legal competencies of Llama Group, which also offers a music streaming portal service. Problems have already been assigned to caretakers so that the situation may improve soon.
