Winamp releases its source code on GitHub — but the legacy media player doesn't go full open-source

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A very limited license has drawn much criticism from the open-source community.

Winamp iconography from official site
(Image credit: Winamp)

Yesterday, the beloved legacy media player application Winamp released its source code on GitHub. Winamp isn't as popular in today's era of apps that stream music with licensing built in (a la Spotify and Apple Music), but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was by far the most popular third-party media player on PC. That should make this a momentous occasion— however, as many members of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community have quickly pointed out, its highly restrictive license prevents a lot of what we'd usually expect from releases like this. So, while Winamp is on GitHub and this is a source code release, it's not like the application has gone "full" open source or anything.

Typically, source code releases correspond to new branches of a given piece of software, often ones that test improvements that may or may not return to the original. However, the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1 dictates that there will be "No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form." Unfortunately, this means we won't see any enhanced or "classic" versions of Winamp anytime soon, at least not from this release.

That's another point of contention—if you only care about the classic version of Winamp, you may be a little disappointed by the modern-day version of the application, which is all included with this release. Winamp Classic can still be found elsewhere on the web but isn't open-sourced—and ideally, a GitHub release like this would be definitive and have an open enough license for the community to evolve Winamp to its highest form.

On the bright side, fanatics of the classic Winamp designs aren't out of luck if they want to keep that aesthetic. Plenty of classic Winamp skins for current Winamp exist, and some enthusiasts even go as far as building physical Winamp-themed music boxes, a la Linamp.

Hopefully, future versions of the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) will remove some of these restrictions, allowing the FOSS community to do the work it would like on such a beloved, historical application. If they have the rights and the files, a proper open-sourcing of Classic Winamp would alto make many enthusiasts happy.

Christopher Harper
Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

5 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Amdlova
    For nostalgic reasons need to download the winamp 2.92 version.

    I just want a asus p2b board, awe32 sound card and a 3dfx voodoo 3.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    I've never stopped using Winamp for local media playback as there simply is no reason to. I just doubled checked and I'm still using the old 5.666 build from December 2013. Over the years I have been a bit disappointed that nobody has been able to take up the mantle, but perhaps this will eventually get there.
    Reply
  • tamalero
    Why release it on Github if they dont allow any improvements or collaborations?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    tamalero said:
    Why release it on Github if they dont allow any improvements or collaborations?
    Well, it lets people do security audits, submit bug fixes, and submit feature enhancements ...unless it's no longer being maintained (is it?). Even if it's not maintained, you can still mod it for personal use, which is kinda cool.

    I don't know if this is what they were worried about, but maybe they didn't want builds of something claiming to be WinAMP that was either malware-infected or had bugs, etc. that the original authors would get swamped with complaints about. That's been a problem other media developers have faced (I'm thinking specifically of mplayer, where certain Linux distros stripped out the patent/license-infringing bits and distributed their own custom builds, which their users would then complain about to the original developers).

    A simple solution for the WinAMP folks would be to exclude the logos, icons, and other branding from the github repo and simply state in the license that you must acknowledge it's derived from WinAMP (similar to the classic BSD license), but you can't actually call yours any variation on the name WinAMP.
    Reply
  • thesyndrome
    Amdlova said:
    For nostalgic reasons need to download the winamp 2.92 version.

    I just want a asus p2b board, awe32 sound card and a 3dfx voodoo 3.
    I'd check out 86Box, it's a PC emulator that goes down to the level of having fully emulated hardware that you can configure.
    I made a Win98 machine with a Pentium MMX 200, a Voodoo 3, and a Sound Blaster 16 sound card out of curiosity and have had a lot of fun going through my old discs to install classic games on there that have no modern support (also Abandonware sites and the Internet Archive are a godsend for this).
    But be aware, because it's emulating the entire system, it's subject to a lot of the old errors and glitches, as well as exceptionally long load times, due to emulating the HDD too, luckily it's got a great community behind it who help out with configurations and common problems.

    Still an interesting project for fun though!
    Reply