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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

#31

Post by delfinom »

Calavar wrote: post #18
abbbi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry, but this was a real shitshow. I dont understand: wtf makes people think spamming an repo in the way they did is in any way useful?

The meme/troll issues were edgy teen style humor and not that funny, but the legitimate ones that tried to gently explain what rebase does and went completely ignored were funny because they felt surreal and hyperreal at the same time. Office-Space-esque comedy.

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

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

#32

Post by colechristensen »

sph wrote: post #22
VonGuard wrote: post #11

This 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…

>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 would not be able to own a patent unless you were using it in your business.

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

#33

Post by armada651 »

delfinom wrote: post #31
Calavar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meme/troll issues were edgy teen style humor and not that funny, but the legitimate ones that tried to gently explain what rebase does and went completely ignored were funny because they felt surreal and hyperreal at the same time. Office-Space-esque comedy.

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.

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

#34

Post by VonGuard »

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…

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.

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

#35

Post by tiahura »

lukeschlather wrote: post #21
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…

Describing this as "comically awful" seems strange. In terms of building a good open source project, they did a bad job. However they did a good job making the source available. Also given all the dependencies they may have (whether intentionally or not) followed the best path to make sure that the source would be useful. They ended up looking bad and exposing themselves to legal trouble, but I'm not sure this was aw…

[flagged]

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

#36

Post by andrewstuart2 »

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.

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.

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

#37

Post by doctorpangloss »

sureIy wrote: post #10

I don't really understand why people complained. The source is open, if don't want to contribute, don't. Just because something doesn't fit a specific definition it doesn't mean it's not worth of existence.

There’s overlap between the retrocomputing-Winamp audience and the litigate-the-opensourceyness-of-licenses audience. The better question is, does there exist anything with an audience where the aesthetic, subjective part of its experience doesn’t matter?

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

#38

Post by fwip »

sph wrote: post #22
VonGuard wrote: post #11

This 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…

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

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

#39

Post by croemer »

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.

The issues are still preserved by archive.org, e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20241009234026/https://github.co...

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

#40

Post by hypeatei »

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.
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