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

Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, posted the source for its “Legacy Player Code” on September 24 so that developers could “contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.”

Less than a month later, that repository has been entirely deleted, after it either bumped up against or broke its strange hodgepodge of code licenses, seemingly revealed the source code for other non-open software packages, and made a pretty bad impression on the open-source community.

“Collaborative” licensing

Winamp’s code was made available in late September, but not very open. Under the “Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1,” you may not “distribute modified versions of the software” in source or binary, and “only the maintainers of the official repository are allowed to distribute the software and its modifications.” Anyone may contribute, in other words, but only to Winamp’s benefit.

Justin Frankel, a key developer of the original Winamp and founder of Nullsoft, which also made SHOUTcast streaming software, was asked on his Q&A site about contributing to the code. Frankel responded that, even if he had some desire, the license terms “are completely absurd in the way they are written.” Even taking them “as they are likely intended,” Frankel wrote, “they are terrible. No thank you.”

Despite how this license would seem to bar forks, or perhaps because of that, the code has been forked at least 2,600 times as of this writing. In forking and examining the source when first released, coders have noticed some, shall we say, anomalies: