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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

#131

Post by talldatethrow »

cortesoft wrote: post #106
larodi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Wouldn't the lenders be pissed you essentially gave away one of the valuable assets they could have sold off to someone else?

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

#133

Post by worik »

GeoAtreides wrote: post #47
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.

(Borland) Delphi also made creating non standard form shapes; the secret was in leveraging the win32 api, which was really easy to do in Delphi. Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm

I found the secret to C++ programming for Windows was using the C API.

It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.

MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.

I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat

Those were (not) the days....

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

#134

Post by bluedino »

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.

Justin Frank used to hang out on IRC in #winprog or something, and I can remember when he was showing us how he made the UI skinnable. Asking for ideas and input etc.

This was back in 96-97?

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

#139

Post by rocky1138 »

RevEng wrote: post #96
LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #3

Twenty years too late for it to possibly matter, but it's still nice to see. Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.

I still use it for all of my locally stored MP3s. I haven't seen a music player in a long time that focused on playing music rather than being a media library.

They tried to shove that in at the end but it's easy to one click it away the first time you turn it on

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

#140

Post by ssl-3 »

gerdesj wrote: post #132

"Winamp will remain the owner of the software and will decide on the innovations made in the official version," explains Alexandre Saboundjian, CEO of Winamp." Which license will be used? "Opening up" is not exactly GPL.

I also don't know what license will be used, but nothing in the GPL prevents [eg] the owners of Winamp continuing to own Winamp, or from deciding what innovations will (or will not) make it to their own official version.

I'm not sure that "opening up" actually means what you may appear to think that it means.

The entirety of present-day Winamp could be released, with code, under the GPL tomorrow and nothing says the org that owns Winamp will somehow cease to own Winamp, or that they must accept others' changes into their own source tree.

(And that's perfectly OK, even under the restrictions of the GPL.)

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