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

about.winamp.com

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

#101

Post by larodi »

ndiddy wrote: post #56

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO. https://forums.winamp.com/…

Why does a company has to go bankrupt to open source? It’s like something that owners want to do in order to be able to fork, not something that is being done for the community or open side of it.

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

#102

Post by zztop44 »

peppertree wrote: post #92
ndiddy wrote: post #56

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO. https://forums.winamp.com/…

Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know what it's like trying to download a music video and end up watching someone getting beheaded.

I’m pretty sure kids these days do know exactly what that’s like (although they wouldn’t be downloading the music video and it wouldn’t have taken over an hour for a shitty 2.3mb file)

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

#103

Post by nailer »

TillE wrote: post #26
pquki4 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very weird. They provide a very specific future date for this, and avoided using the term "open source". I can't recall any other company doing this. Most of the time, companies provide a github repository at the same time they make such announcements. Even for twitter, Elon Musk promised the algorithm would be opened, and then some time later it was just there. While generally it is a positive thing to see code bein…

> I can't recall any other company doing this Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).

It’s still happening. Bad companies are swapping between using ‘open source’ inaccurately (to get grants and funding) and saying ‘source available’ (when people call them on their bullshit) now.

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

#106

Post by cortesoft »

larodi wrote: post #101
ndiddy wrote: post #56

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO. https://forums.winamp.com/…

Why does a company has to go bankrupt to open source? It’s like something that owners want to do in order to be able to fork, not something that is being done for the community or open side of it.

Well, their business model was selling the software… it is harder to do that if it is open source.

Once you are going bankrupt, you are going to lose the asset anyway, so there is no incentive to keep it closed source.

Is it really that hard to figure out why a company open sources when going bankrupt?

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

#107

Post by wrigby »

peppertree wrote: post #92
ndiddy wrote: post #56

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO. https://forums.winamp.com/…

Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know what it's like trying to download a music video and end up watching someone getting beheaded.

I realize this is a joke, but can’t resist mentioning that LimeWire was (is?) open source (or at least used an open network in GnuTella)

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

#108

Post by mesh »

yazzku wrote: post #15
renegade-otter wrote: post #12

I remember as a hobbyist Windows programmer (Borland C++ Builder) I was really envious of the skills required to build something like Winamp - especially the UI. Back then, advanced learning resources and examples were effectively non-existent or at least, hard to find and stitch together.

The fact that you can re-skin it at runtime with such a wide variety of skins and load such a variety of plugins puts modern software to shame.

I owe my entire career to the fact that Winamp added the ability to re-skin.

I had just graduated graduate school for international economics, and was working for a government contractor who only hired me because I had a masters (they could charge the government more). Because of this, I literally had nothing to do and would just sit in the office.

I eventually figured out an excuse to get my employer to buy Photoshop for me and I started learning it on company time. When Winamp came out with the update to add skins, I ended up making one of the very first skins (meshAMP) which became really popularly.

https://archive.org/details/winampskins_meshAmp

(I am cringing looking at it now)

This led to contract job with STB (to design interfaces for a TV Tuner card they had) and eventually 3DFX (paid in 3d video cards), and eventually a career change and a job as a graphic designer.

Except, I was not a good designer, so I quickly learned to program (ASP.net and then JAVA), which led to Macromedia Flash, which led to Macromedia Generator, which eventually led to a job offer from Macromedia (now Adobe), where I still am (sadly, sans Flash).

Anyways, thank your WinAMP!

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