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Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

arstechnica.com

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Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#61

Post by Calavar »

AdamJacobMuller wrote: post #46
belthesar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The source wasn't open though, it was available, and it was provided in a sense that fully showcased that they did not understand what they were doing. Everything from licenses that were fully unenforceable and non-compliant with Github's license agreement to illegally distributing proprietary code to fundamentally misunderstanding how to use git. It's one thing to provide a source available codebase. That's a choice…

It doesn't meet your definition of the word open. Of course they didn't know what they were doing. It was written by a 19-year-old in the mid 90s. The code is messy with poor licensing and some build tools were included in the repository and they wrote a dumb license for it? Who cares, they shipped a product that 10s of millions of people used and loved and wanted to share that code up to the world and instead of emb…

> It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.

That's a disingenuous argument. It doesn't meet the OSI's definition of open.

> the community piled on them until they said it was so not worth it that just pulled the whole thing.

Yes, but let's be honest: If it wasn't the community, it would have been DMCA takedown requests from the companies whose software was published in the repo. At best, the community hastened the end of the repo by a few weeks.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#62

Post by pelorat »

Plenty of people have copies of the source and the release was just a novelty really. There's no point in anyone actually forking, building and releasing new versions of Winamp as it has been surpassed by other "real" OSS players eons ago. Let's face it, the release was mostly for Internet historians.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#63

Post by rightbyte »

hypeatei wrote: post #40
Calavar wrote: post #7

We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code - that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal delete third party non-FOSS software.

Seriously, watching that unfold was hilarious. I also feel like some were being too harsh for no reason. The repo owner was responsive and merging PRs.

Might be another person than the one making the calls.

It is abit sad that they messed up the licensing. It would be fun nostalgia to run the 'real' Winamp on Linux. Native. Emulation does not count.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#64

Post by Sakos »

colechristensen wrote: post #32
sph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense. Because what is the point if something is distributed in a restrictive license, can't be preserved and then gets lost to time? Also, licensing is to avoid distribution, modification or outright copying by competitors; preservation is completely orthogonal to those concerns. It is to avoid losing a piece of craft to the sands of time…

>preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense. If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve something because it has been abandoned, then the thing should automatically be in the public domain. If you are not actively using IP for a reasonable amount of time, any patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc should be permanently expired. This fixes problems with patent trolls too: you effectively w…

> If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve something because it has been abandoned, then the thing should automatically be in the public domain.

Yeah, you go ahead and get that through every Western government. We'll fix the rest.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#65

Post by johnnyanmac »

arp242 wrote: post #51

The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them. It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous. It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.…

The forking was bizarre and I agree with your take on it ("forking" with no other changes is not "distribution" except in the most obtuse way). But the licensing issues with what 3rd party software they threw in there was a pretty serious issue. It was probably inevitable they'd take it down and redo it even without the drama.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#66

Post by Sakos »

fwip wrote: post #38
sph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense. Because what is the point if something is distributed in a restrictive license, can't be preserved and then gets lost to time? Also, licensing is to avoid distribution, modification or outright copying by competitors; preservation is completely orthogonal to those concerns. It is to avoid losing a piece of craft to the sands of time…

> There is no reason laws should have power over anything in perpetuity. Laws are simply rules chosen and enforced by a given society. Having power over things is what they do. (Also, "in perpetuity" seems untrue, as all copyright expires eventually.) You clearly disagree with the laws (and I'm inclined to support you there), but what is special about preservation that it should automatically override the will of soc…

> but what is special about preservation

Because it's the only thing that will be left of us in 100, 500, 1000, 10000 years. Whatever we care to preserve today will be what will be left to our descendants. It always matters more than the profits of some company today that won't be around in 10, 20, 100 years. And before you try to argue that not everything is valuable, that's fucking not up to you to decide for our descendants.

> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.

Works that were lost through things like war, conflict, migration, etc. Not through conscious choice. Copyright is a deliberate decision to prevent the collective preservation of our modern culture in favour of enriching corporations and the handful of people who own them. But that doesn't make it moral or right. And "society being okay with it" doesn't make it okay either.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#67

Post by freedomben »

arp242 wrote: post #51

The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them. It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous. It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.…

My thoughts exactly. It was shocking and appalling to me how people reacted to this effort. Instead of praising them for taking such a big step, the airwaves were saturated with people magnifying every little imperfection and shitting all over them for it.

If anyone is thinking about open sourcing (and/or making source available) their previously closed app, they had better be paying attention to this. The clear message I saw is that open sourcing is not worth it.

And that sucks and is the exact opposite of how it should be. Open sourcing is an amazing gift you can give to humanity, and instead of looking the gift horse in the mouth and bitching about some imperfections, we should have been praising them and thanking them for their generosity, and sending PRs to help fix issues.

The mess resulting from the Winamp open sourcing/source availabling is more on us (the community) than them, IMHO. If we had acted like rational adults instead of emotionally charged children dehumanizing strangers on the internet and shitting all over them, they would have fixed the issues and we'd be in a better place. Instead now, we have nothing. This is why we can't have nice things.

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#68

Post by johnnyanmac »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #36
armada651 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just the reality of any platform that doesn't gatekeep who gets to participate. Eventually assholes are going to join, that's simply unavoidable.

Sure, but then there's also the reality that people who don't want to deal with assholes and trolls will pack up and leave. So IMO it's best to combat it and not normalize it, so that we can have more nice things.

The net all over made it clear well over a decade ago that we won't get any serious moderation past a certain critical mass. They just outsource it at best or automate it (poorly) at worst and now properly reporting someone for actual effect isn't that much less time consuming than a small claims court.

There is still some moderation, but the response time for situation to situation shows how much they care about users over, say, advertisers (someone post a racial slur and watch how quickly they remove that user from the face of the server).

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#69

Post by candiddevmike »

armada651 wrote: post #33
delfinom wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The troll issues are exactly why my OSS group does not use GitHub at all. It's become a toxic platform for quite awhile.

That's just the reality of any platform that doesn't gatekeep who gets to participate. Eventually assholes are going to join, that's simply unavoidable.

GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for moderation though. Like restricting issue creation, comments, and discussions to only certain folks (beyond the per-issue controls).

Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks

#70

Post by freedomben »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #65
arp242 wrote: post #51

The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them. It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous. It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.…

The forking was bizarre and I agree with your take on it ("forking" with no other changes is not "distribution" except in the most obtuse way). But the licensing issues with what 3rd party software they threw in there was a pretty serious issue. It was probably inevitable they'd take it down and redo it even without the drama.

Agreed it probably was inevitable, but I would be surprised if the "redo" part even happens now. Why would it? They spent their time/money giving us a gift, and we mainly just mocked them because the gift had imperfections. I wouldn't blame them for adopting a "go f*k yourself" attitude.
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