Releasing WinAmp source goes badly – for its owners, anyway
www.theregister.com
As badly as the later development of the player itself, really
  • fl42v@lemmy.ml
    100·
    1 month ago

    I know, right… Damn foss enthusiasts, you show 'em sources in order to get some cheap publicity, and those bastards immediately start raising a stink over you slightly attempting to fuck them over with licensing

  • Peffse@lemmy.world
    54·
    1 month ago

    Did they comment on why it was deleted? I didn’t see anything in the article. I recall the consensus was that they made so many mistakes the only way to fix it was deletion of the repo.

    I also saw in one of the comments of the Arstechnica article that the one who pushed for open-source wanted to clean up the code before publishing. Management said no, the entire team got fired/left, and suddenly the code got published with all that commercial stuff left in. Sounds about right.

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
      30·
      1 month ago

      Based on the article, this is a train wreck of cosmic proportions. My guess is, the CEO panicked and went into damage mitigation mode.

      Sounds like they’re trying to put out a titanium fire using only a bucket of water. What could go wrong.

      • sawdustprophet@midwest.socialEnglish
        13·
        1 month ago

        Sounds like they’re trying to put out a titanium fire using only a bucket of water.

        I have a new phrase to use in the future.

  • gomp@lemmy.ml
    36·
    1 month ago

    I must say, this whole shitshow has been pretty funny to watch :)

    • taanegl@beehaw.org
      25·
      1 month ago

      This, and the WordPress mess, are two contenders for this years “wtf are u even doing” award.

    • a1studmuffin@aussie.zoneEnglish
      14·
      1 month ago

      Sometimes the real value of a project isn’t its proposed worth, but the schadenfreude it offers instead. I’ve backed a few failed Kickstarters that I absolutely got my money’s worth on.

      • Supermariofan67
        52·
        1 month ago

        Winamp published their code as “open source”. Problem is…

        1. It wasn’t open source, it was proprietary but you can see the source code.
        2. Their custom license didn’t even allow forks, which is against GitHub TOS
        3. The codebase apparently contains proprietary code from third parties that they don’t have the right to relicense.
        4. The codebase apparently contains GPL code from third parties that they probably didn’t have the right to make proprietary in the first place
        • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
          3·
          1 month ago

          Wait, there’s GPL code there as well???

          I’d heard of all the others but this ome kinda snuck under the radar with all the larger issues at play here

          • Supermariofan67
            3·
            1 month ago

            The article on theregister stated

            Also inside the uploaded source code was some GPL 2 source code, which renders the not-very-open WCL moot.

        • superglue@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          1 month ago

          On top of that, when told about the proprietary code, they deleted it from the repository thinking that was just the end if it. So they didn’t have any idea how git works either.

      • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
        10·
        1 month ago

        Winamp source code was published on github, but the license said you can’t fork or share the code. Such a license isn’t compatible with github, which is all about forking and sharing.

  • AVincentInSpace@pawb.socialEnglish
    23·
    1 month ago

    ohhh nooooo, who could possibly have seen this coming

    not like that repo was getting constantly vandalized as people realized it contained copyrighted code that the winamp owners didn’t have the rights to which the project managers were halfheartedly playing whack-a-mole with