121–130 of 371 posts
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.
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> If possible and willing to risk deletion, try to upload it on Github as well; You could have easily done this yourself, under your GitHub account in the time it took you to compose your reply (with fewer keystrokes at least). GP seems content with their self-hosted mirror.
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.…
As i remember, they were caught violating the GPL.
I'm sorry, i don't think that law applies only to some unfortunate people.
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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 hastene…
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 mess…
For instance, is this just something that’s being dumped out on the internet in case someone else finds it useful?
Is it part of your portfolio and intended to showcase your technical skill, but not necessarily be polished from a UX perspective?
Or is it intended to be useful for end users?
Maybe it would be good to have a visually distinct and consistent badge or checklist available for open source projects to communicate the high-level goals so that people’s expectations are set correctly and they know what kind of feedback is inappropriate.
Every project is going to nominally be as-is for obvious liability reasons.
- UX Tier 10 for completely tech-illiterate users
- UX Tier 9 for infrequent mainstream users (do not need to watch a tutorial)
- UX Tier 8 for frequent mainstream users (have watched tutorials)
- UX Tier 7 for power users (need to read the manual)
- UX Tier 6 for sysadmin users (responsible for keeping it running for above users)
- UX Tier 5 for domain specialist users (know the theory behind it)
- UX Tier 4 for developers (read the API reference)
- UX Tier 3 for domain specialist developers (API reference and know the theory)
- UX Tier 2 for project ecosystem developers (know conventions and idiomatic patterns)
- UX Tier 1 for the project team itself (know where the skeletons are buried)
- UX Tier 0 for no further development anticipated
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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?
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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…
Yes, OEMs are expected to release their kernels' sources. Also yeah, they're mostly very bad at it.
And 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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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 mess…
There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts to meet halfway between open participation and business interests. I think as far as defending against copycat risk, that's somewhat reasonable. Many in the OSS community have made it clear that there's a distinction between "yes do whatever you want with it, including running a local instance and/or charging people for it while using the original name" and…
Hey, that's me! :-)
(the following is not targeted at you, but at the "Fair Source" idea. You are just the messenger here presenting the idea, I wouldn't shoot you. Although I do respectfully take issue with some phrasing of yours, which I take as an occasion to explain my rebuttal of the Fair Source idea:)
> There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts to meet halfway between open participation and business interests
Open source is not necessarily open participation. See for instance SQLite: open source, but not open participation.
Open source is also not at odds with business interests, given the right business model. See also SQLite, and the many successful commercial open source projects.
Open participation and business interests can also go hand in hand, but my comment is already too long to develop on this and I want to focus on the free software aspect.
I reject this idea that source available but not open source being fair and being some "middle ground" between proprietary and FLOSS. User empowerment and freedom is not only 50% lost in the process, it is almost totally lost. There are few things we can do with some code we can't use anyway. There's nothing fair to the user about proprietary software, and the source availability of the software is only barely relevant to this. There's no middle ground: either you have the fundamental rights allowing you to control your computing, or you don't have them.
I think seeing those things as fair / middle grounds is a dangerous idea. The idea that open source prevents doing business and open source needing some taming down for businesses to succeed is also dangerous.
There's a reason to be adamant with the "purity" of licenses being free software without compromise. It's because if you lose even one of the fundamental rights guaranteed by the free software definition, you lose control of your computing.
I guess I probably sound like some fanatic.
To be clear, I was not part of the people reacting on the Winamp repository, and I think things need to be discussed respectfully.
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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).
> GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for moderation though Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
It's fine both to "moderate" your own repo, as well as to "censor" your own repo. No need to play word games or demand that strangers that you owe absolutely nothing to can't be upset. They can be upset, and you can ignore them until they go away.