Winamp source code released, but developers criticize its restrictive license

The legacy media player, Winamp, has gone open source. But the license has come under fire from the open-source community.

A few months ago, Llama Group SA, the company that owns Winamp, announced its intention to release the source code for Winamp on September 24. That’s exactly what has happened.

Winamp source code is now available on GitHub

The source code that has been released is related to the classic version of the music player. The license documentation, which you can view on Winamp’s official GitHub page, is captioned “Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) “. That doesn’t sound good, does it?

(Image courtesy: Winamp)

Is Winamp open source? Not really

If you scroll through the page down to section 4, the license states the following.

Is Winamp open source - Not really

Essentially, it seems like they just want people to come, look at the code, fix the bugs for them, and wait for them to be reviewed by the maintainers. This means that the developers could reject changes or features, so there is not much freedom for improvement.

The license also states that all intellectual property rights and copyrights related to contributions are assigned to Winamp. The contributor has to waive any rights of authorship, or to object to changes made to the contributions. This in turn grants Winamp full rights to use your contributions without any compensation to the person who contributed the code. This forced “waiving of the rights” is illegal in many Countries, including Belgium, where Llama Group SA is based.

Do you get it? It is basically unpaid work, and only the official app gets the features/improvements. The person who contributed has no freedom whatsoever. Almost every user who replied to the announcement on X(Twitter), is furious, and rightfully so.

And it gets worse in Section 5. Restrictions (refer to the screenshot above).

So, contributors cannot distribute modified versions of Winamp even in source code format. Only the maintainers, aka the company, can. This is a rather bizarre license. Other developers will not be allowed to create a Winamp version of their own and distribute it. So, it is not open source? That’s what it seems to be. Why bother releasing the source code at all? If this was supposed to be a PR move, it is a disaster. Here’s something funny, they “accidentally” included the source code of SHOUTcast Server’s software with Winamp’s code, but then removed it.

Winamp updated the license to allow forking, but….

Guess what? Winamp’s license violated GitHub’s Terms of Services, which says: “By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and “fork” your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).” There is an open discussion about this on Winamp’s GitHub.

The company edited the licensing information (WCL 1.0.1) to allow forking of the code, but for private use only, i.e. you are still not allowed to distribute your custom versions that have been modified. Well, Winamp’s source code has nearly 1000 forks at the time of writing this article, so that’s some good news.

DrO, the creator of WACUP (Winamp Community Update Project), criticized the company’s licensing restrictions on reddit, and also published a statement about it on WACUP’s Facebook page, saying that he would not use the source code for his version of the music player.

What do you think about this?

Summary