Winamp Legacy player source code

ndiddy

I'm curious how they expect people to contribute to the project. Section 4 of the license says "Contribution to Project: You are encouraged to contribute improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes back to the project. Contributions must be submitted to the official repository and will be reviewed and incorporated at the discretion of the maintainers." However, the restrictions in Section 5 ban forking the code or distributing modified versions. This means that the standard Github "fork the repo, make your changes in a branch, and send a pull request" workflow for submitting changes would violate the license.

davidpfarrell

The best thing we can do for the future of the project is to NOT engage with the project at this time ... Even just cloning the project into your private workspace to review / compile is giving more engagement than their current licensing stance warrants.

I'll check again when an HN post comes out stating they've changed their licensing stance - Until then, closing this tab and forgetting about it ...

nicholashead

I remember hanging out in #mpeg3 on EFNet many many years ago and becoming an acquaintance of Justin Frankel while he was working on this. I had made a skin and even a few tray icons for him to use in the app, and some of them are in here. I can't remember 100% which ones were mine, but the punchlabel one definitely was. My name is in the credits too: https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/blob/0695744fd658c42...

abtinf

They are either going to have to submit a ton of DMCA requests to GitHub and get their own repo taken down by GitHub, or they will be at risk of losing their copyright and will take it off GitHub themselves.

Forking is a fundamental feature of GitHub. Forking policy may only be set on private repos, but this is a public repo. The license doesn’t permit forking. There are already 6 forks.

Typically, copyright is not lost through selective enforcement (unlike trademark), but in this case the rights holder is making license violations both trivial and has full access to the list of violators. I suspect the courts will laugh them out of the room unless they vigorously defend their rights.

In that case, I certainly wouldn’t want to deal with it if I was GitHub. It is a terrible user experience, where a user clicking one of the most popular buttons on the platform suddenly becomes a legal problem.

thefourthchime

I have a little history with Winamp. I wrote a popular plugin for it back in the day.

This is the source code for Winamp 3, which is a total rewrite of winamp 2 in C++. In my opinion, it was overcomplicated and over-architected. The original source code by Justin Frankel in C.

aantix

Back in the summer of 1999 while I was in college, we were the first house to use MP3's at our parties. Most houses used a CD disc shuffler which usually consisted of a bunch of scratched and smudged discs, so their music skipped all the time.

We went all digital. We were ahead of our time.

The parties were in the basement. We'd lock the computer up in a spare bedroom - ran the wires and speakers out to the main basement area.

We used Winamp on shuffle.

Hours of music without a single skip, without us having to babysit the music.

Thank-you Winamp for the great memories.

abetusk

A perversion of the term "open". The licensing terms do not allow redistribution or resale, which is a condition of "open source" (as it's commonly accepted).

Note how the title nor the repository says "open source". I would have called this source available, not that "the source is now open".

lofaszvanitt

The only music player that wasn't annoying. Just did its job with a streamlined interface, without the clutter and clunky graphics that competitors thought was the way to go.

sionisrecur

Funny, the latest commit is "Removing code which is not open"[0], which means they are infringing on someone else's licensing terms by keeping it in the git history.

[0] https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/commit/0a4b7d32d0906...

Asmod4n

If you want a free copy of the SHOUTcast server software, they illegally share that code in their repo ..

eminence32

Open sourcing is always good, because maybe you can learn some things by reading it. Also, Winamp Legacy is a fairly important piece of software, so having an archive of its source is a great thing.

But the restrictions on the source are interesting. To quote the license file:

    * No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.
    * No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.
    * Official Distribution: Only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.

I'm guessing the "No Forking" clause means I can't release my own media player based on this source code, but the language is curious because they explicitly welcome contributions and for a project hosted on Github the standard way to do that is to "fork" the project into your own account.

klaussilveira

I can't comprehend such a restrictive license on abandonware. And from the the looks of it, not very well written abandonware.

qrush

This really whips the llama's ass

comprev

The source code itself appears to come from a cracked version [0]

   supplied by deadbeef\n\n\

   cracked by rOn\n\n\
 
   32kb cool intro by lone";

[0] https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/blob/community/Src/W...

Edit: Apparently it's an Easter Egg! Credit to bri3d for research

ChrisArchitect

Further discussion about this "opening up" back in May:

Winamp has announced that it is "opening up" its source code

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40383029

voidfunc

Bizarre license reeks of a company that doesn't know what to do with their own highly regarded software but is desperate for the community to give them free improvements that they can later monetize.

grandpoobah

You know what source code I'd like to see? ICQ and MSN and/or Windows Messenger.

blendergeek

Everyone is commenting on the distribution terms. But the Contributions section is just as bizzare.

> Waiver of Rights: You waive any rights to claim authorship of the contributions or to object to any distortion, mutilation, or other modifications of the contributions.

I waive the right to claim that I authored my contributions? Wait, what?

Why would I ever contribute to this project under this license?

f1shy

I was expecting to see some comment about the quality of the code. How clean (or not) it is.

I was personaly hopping a much more ordered and clean codebase.

pelagicAustral

This by long distance the most chaotic open sourcing of a piece of software I have ever seen in my life...

opan

Not open source, not free software. Restrictions in license found here for those curious:

https://github.com/WinampDesktop/winamp/blob/community/LICEN...

interestica

It's 2024. Was Winamp2 + plugin system just peak audio playback software?

johndhi

Simply reading the word "Winamp" brings back a nostalgia for me almost like smelling the perfume of an old girlfriend.

Spent so many hours looking at my custom Winamp skin and playing songs I'd downloaded from god-knows-where...

stuaxo

For anyone who wants to support a proper legacy I recommend backing the WACUP project.

It's based on the winamp3 code, that Winamp did open source, and then the closed source parts are being re implemented.

29athrowaway

There is an open source clone of Winamp called XMMS.

Sonique and Foobar2000 were also venerable players of that era.

aflukasz

"We take DirectX 9 SDK (June 2010) from Microsoft, modify it and pack to archive. Run unpack_microsoft_directx_sdk_2010.cmd to unpack it."

Nice. Wonder how long will this version work?

jarebear6expepj

Please also add the source for the Linux Alpha version that briefly showed face.

yason

This is the license equivalent of a specific automotive spare part for an old car where the dealer asks $1300 for it just to say they don't want to stock and sell those. "Yeah, it's available, sure, but...you don't want it."

pessimizer

Why did people start talking about open source in this thread? This is almost the opposite of open source, and doesn't claim to be open source. It's restrictive to the point where you should just treat it as an official source leak. It's even called "collaborative" by which they clearly mean that if you want to work on the software, you're free to send them a pull request. You're also free to compile it yourself, as long as you don't distribute it (modified or not) in any way.

Nothing wrong with this, but I don't understand why people started arguing about open source. Because you get to look at the source?

johnchristopher

Which winamp is it ? Version 2 ? Version 3 with the wasabi (?) engine ? Or version 5 ?

dfedbeef

Finally I can play MP3s on my desktop computer

papruapap

man, at first glance doesnt look like a lot of work to add support to linux.

Linkd

Are there any tools that can receive an entire code base like this, then analyze and answer questions about the code, structure, functionality?

timvdalen

What happened here? Did someone buy the rights to the original Winamp? The linked site doesn't look very related to the original Winamp.

mihaitodor

Wish they bothered to preserve the commit history... Can't imagine anything sensitive in there that they couldn't share.

ilrwbwrkhv

One of the best pieces of software ever made. Will devour its code. Hopefully new startups like Slack can learn from it too.

sunshadow

According to the license, this repo is not that different than me just extracting the source code from the binaries. Pass.

phendrenad2

Cool, I guess. But WinAmp is in the category of software that is easy to write, but benefits hugely from the network effect. Nobody would care about WinAmp if it weren't for the huge number of skins the community created for it.

lucideer

"source code is open" implies "open source", and the License refers to itself as a "copyleft" license, but it's a newly minted license - IANAL does anyone know if this is open source or another Elastic type situation?

factorialboy

F yeahhhhh ... the player that never crashed, even if Windows OS crashed all around it

This is more significant (to me) than the iPhone 16 launch, I'll pay for people who can port this to Linux (Gnome) and Mac OS.

JosephRedfern

There is some pretty creative swearing throughout this codebase - very entertaining!

rollcat

Eh, here we go again, there's yet-another custom license, "Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0". Quick skim:

> No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.

> No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software.

It's basically "look but do not touch". I don't see why this was necessary for something that's basically abandonware by now, and is mostly of historical interest.

metflex

Is there any chance or an already existing fork to build for apple silicon mac!?

Karellen

Oooh, a legacy version of winamp? Might as well clone the repo, that'll be a pretty small download, from before when software got all bloated

...

750Mb later: WTF?

[tippety tappety clickedy clackedy]

Oh.... they vendored everything, including a bunch of external x86 binaries. 32- and 64-bit. FFS.

But also - I sure hope they got the licensing correct for those parts...

zerkten

Is there an official announcement or something else that accompanied this? I don't know the current state of their organization and the chain of ownership for the code.

phito

I don't really care about the whole licensing thing, but some of the people in the issues section are being quite immature about it.

jollyllama

Awesome, that's far more interesting than the new implementation, which doesn't include the batch media transcoding for exports to mp3 players.

adzm

Maybe finally this can help clarify how their WASABI interface thing works for the visualization plugins

initramfs

If you're just looking for a repository to steal, https://github.com/hatonthecat/CloneThisRepository

zadler

Lot of fun looking at an old battle worn codebase like this.

jijji

it looks like they are using mpg123 for the actual mp3 decoding

thrashwerk

What a load of BS. This is just a poor attempt at open-source-washing.

They rolled their own license but couldn't be bothered to read GitHub's ToS.

"collaborative" license, "opened to the community", "enabling the entire community to participate in its development", "global collaboration" but you have to grant them perpetual rights and waive your own, you're not even allowed to fork lol.

Seems like they're only looking for unpaid workers.

suarezvictor

The license sucks

momentsinabox

Haven't thought about converting FLAC files to mp3 in a while. Hell yeah Winamp

gjvc

prmoustache

Can't we just let it die?

scblock

Source-available but certainly not open source.

"You are granted the right to view, access, and study the source code of the software. You are granted the right to Modify the software for private use only."

"No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form."

"No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software."

quinnharley

[dead]

synergy20

sorry but why does old winamp code still matter? there are plenty open source audio libraries these days along with different open source players.