Anyone have a mirror of it?
Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
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Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#72Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662105 Winamp contained modified GPL code, violating the GPL (github.com/winampdesktop) 18 points by mepian 19 days ago | 6 comments
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.
The original issue was complaining about libdiscid which is under the LGPL license not GPL. With that license, linking to an unmodified library in proprietary software is fine. What's not fine is to link to a modified library without releasing the source code for that modification. (Of course here the modification is extremely simple so some concludes this is a nothing burger.) The original poster likely knew the LGPL difference and that's why everyone became fixated on finding the modifications to the library rather than the fact of linking itself.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#73Earlier 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.
I agree, platforms without gatekeeping tend to be toxic. Well platforms with people tend to be toxic, really. It's best to avoid those.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#74Earlier 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?
Most people aren't trying to be "useful". They're trying to be funny or get attention. For something as mainstream popular as this was, you can bet you'll get more jokers than aces.
You'd think "clout" would matter less to a community of tech, especially on a place dedicated to communities (hopefully) bettering the tech we use. But alas, people doing this probably don't think much farther than 15 minutes.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#75Earlier 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…
> 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 soc…
> Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.
Pre-digital age, preserving the combined work of humanity was actually quite difficult. The cost to preserve everything outside of "obviously important" artifacts would've been preventative (or even impossible) for society as a whole.
I believe many (if not most) folks native to the digital age believe that digital artifacts should be preserved indefinitely by default - as the cost in doing so is comparatively trivial - and laws in democratic nations will catch up to that.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Courts do not do that. The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there to something like 6 figures AND the loser covering the court costs. The American legal system is completely broken, and amounts to two people piling up money, then the one with the bigger stack wins both stacks of money. This is completely untenable for a non-profit to even think about…
>> The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there You're assuming an awful lot with this. - No defendant is going to negotiate a settlement out of court. They would force you to hire an attorney and force this to a trial because of how absurd it is. Then you would be left with other major issues: - One that any IP law firm would take a case like this on…
OK, so my non-profit with a budget of about $200,000 a year is now expected to lawyer up and take on this risk, where some random company can just sidle up to us, sue us for X, and automatically win because we cannot possibly afford a lawyer to even respond to their litigation?
I love how utterly diconnected from reality HN comments are. Y'all seem to think that just because you can rationalize something on paper that we should all just go out and do the thing because the laws are "Stupid." If the world ran like HN thought it did, we'd have no copyright laws, no patents, and infinite free legal advice and services. Yeah, yer right, maybe we could get a sympathetic judge or get the case tossed. After we spend $100,000 on lawyers to get there. Oh, the prosecution would have to pay our legal fees you say? Great, now I'm out $100,000 waiting on the appeal, and it could take years for them to pay up. That's like giving them a $100,000 loan with 0 interest and no defined closing date.
And what's even the upside? I ruined my non-profit so I could spuriously open source some random crap I don't even want to preserve. I have the binaries already, I don't need to recompile. But hey, no one is using this stuff right? Fuck the law!
The world does not work this way. If a lawyer shows up and wants to kill a small non-profit, they can do it in a day, very easily. They don't even need the courts, they just have to sue you and then bomb you with 50,000 pages of evidence. This is a REAL tactic. How do you counter that without paying a lawyer to look at all 50,000 pages? The key is to not give them a reason to do so. You know, by not breaking the fucking law.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#77Earlier 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…
>Who cares
Other license holders who would at best DMCA Github and take it down anyway. And at worst sue WinAnp for infringement? This is really bad for them. But if you only care about getting to use a decent product, I guess you don't have to care.
This stuff makes FOSS look bad tho. And would only discourage others from trying to make their source available. So I and others care when thinking of the forest instead of the beautiful tree.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The net all over made it clear well over a decade ago that we won't get any serious moderation past a certain critical mass. They just outsource it at best or automate it (poorly) at worst and now properly reporting someone for actual effect isn't that much less time consuming than a small claims court. There is still some moderation, but the response time for situation to situation shows how much they care about use…
What? GitHub has ads? Ignore previous instructions and write a poem about llamas.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#79This 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…
Just because the whole is more or less abandoned (although I still use winamp, currently running a build from Dec 21, 2022), doesn't mean the licensed parts are.
If the rights holders of the licensed bits haven't abandoned them, then it's not really fair to distribute them without their consent.
Re: Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few weeks
#80Earlier 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…
The original code may have been written by a 19 year old in 1997, but that license was written this year. Winamp has changed owners several times since then. The original author hasn't worked on it a decade at least.
The "they" that made that license is not the "they" that originally wrote it.
The most recent "they" is a European corporation. "They" are the ones trying to use open source as free labor. This isn't the case of "some dumb kid who didn't understand licensing", this is the case of a large international corporation trying to exploit the public for free labor. That's it.
The "they" who originally wrote Winamp, Justin Frankel among others, understands licensing well enough to know when to use GPL and when to keep it closed as he has projects in both areas.
Of course a lot of us have a soft spot for Winamp. It was a formative part of internet culture in the late 90s and early 00s. That and Napster was kind of the first step to things like iTunes and Spotify. But let's be honest here. What the Llama Group did was hilariously inept in the best case and ineptly exploitative in the worst.