This, btw, is why open sourcing proprietary software rarely happens: you actually have to go to a fair amount of careful effort to get it right. If you don’t, you end up with this debacle.
Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
111–120 of 371 posts
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters here, and this idea will not make anyone money.
It's not a great idea, because law and policy are designed to privilege makers rather than takers. It's a subversive degenerate kind of morality to argue that things belong to the people who desire to consume them.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
To be honest I didn't see the license issues until this thread, because I had already checked out of the discussion by the time that was brought up. And it would have been fine to say "hey, I think there may be a problem here, let's work together to see if we can solve it" wrt. to either their custom license or the GPL. That is not what happened. The sad thing is there would be many knowledgable patient people who wo…
You think they should've just left the license-violating repo up for others to possibly also unknowingly violate?
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see the original issue, but it's interesting that the title chooses to highlight the fact that the GPL code was modified . Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial. If the Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or not, then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full corresponding source be provided under a GPL license.
> Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial. If the Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or not, then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full corresponding source be provided under a GPL license. That's just not true, surely? Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the same problem? How many apps out there are…
> That's just not true, surely?
It is true.
> Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the same problem?
The Linux kernel has an explicit "system calls are not linking" exception to avoid any possible confusion on this matter.
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/excep...
Merely using the kernel's facilities from user space does not make your program a derivative work of the kernel.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#115Earlier 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…
Agreed. The "purists" are dickwads.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#116This story is analogous to a landowner and a group of neighborhood kids. The landowner allows the kids to play baseball in his field, but then the kids complain the grass is not cut, they are playing late into the evening, a few kids vandalize damage his flower bed, and his lawyers tell him he will be sued if he doesn't make all these safety changes, and so the landowner says screw it and puts up a fence.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#117And here's another story to add to the book "How to shoot yourself in the foot by not knowing how the Internet and software licenses work", should anyone write that one day. Also, from one ArsTechnica link posted later in this story, one former dev told that the 4 WA Legacy developers were fired and soon he left too, so I guess they presumably had either no one or very few resources who knew that code and were in the…
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Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#118The 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.…
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Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#119This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there was a scanner that could detect th…
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…
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Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#120I’ll just leave this here. https://webamp.org/
My holy grail would be Winamp on iPhone: one screen just for the classic player, another for the equalizer, one for the list of tracks, and one for the visualizer.