Winamp owner deletes “open source” repository on GitHub after rocky month

The contents of Winamp’s “open source” GitHub repository were deleted after less than a month. This move came after the owners, Llama Group, were criticized by the free and open source software (FOSS) community for their extremely restrictive license. The original GitHub version was under the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) 1.0, which states No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the Software. The deletion apparently came after The Register contacted the developers about the inclusion of the Shoutcast DNAS code and some codecs from Intel and Microsoft.

(Image credit: Tom’s Hardware)

The Register said that some GitHub users have pointed out in the project’s comments that this license actually violates the platform’s terms of service and that the repository upload is not truly open source. This License was ultimately revised to WCL 1.0.1, which changed the line to “Do Not Distribute Modified Versions”: You may not distribute modified versions of the Software, whether in source or binary form. This means that you can now build on the code that Winamp uploaded to GitHub, but you cannot share it with others. Although the Winamp source code was online for the world to see, it wasn’t completely open source because you can’t freely redistribute the changes you make.

Aside from these licensing shenanigans, other GitHub users also noticed that there were a few bits of code in Winamp’s release that Winamp didn’t own (or no longer owned) in the first place. The registry says this includes server code for Shoutcast Distributed Network Audio Server (DNAS), originally developed by Nullsoft, the original owners of Winamp. Llama Group eventually bought Winamp and Shoutcast, but sold the latter to Azerion in 2022, meaning it no longer has the rights to Shoutcast DNAS. Proprietary source code from Microsoft and Intel was also discovered in the repository, which could potentially land Llama Group in trouble with these giants.

Because of these issues, the Winamp repository has likely been removed from GitHub, and it’s unlikely we’ll see any form of Winamp – classic or otherwise – on an open source platform. This outdated media player is just too old, with a lot of proprietary parts coming from several other companies that aren’t particularly interested in their code being made available to the world for free. It would take a huge investment and a lot of time to clean up Winamp’s backend for an open source release, but would anyone do it knowing they wouldn’t get a dime back?

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