Winamp owner removes “Open Source” repository after turbulent month on GitHub

When you purchase through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.

Content from Winamp’s “open source” GitHub repository was removed after less than a month. The move came after its owners, Llama Group, were criticized by the free and open source software (FOSS) community for its highly restrictive license. The original GitHub release was under the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) 1.0, which states No Fork: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the Software.. The removal appears to have happened after The Register contacted the developers regarding the inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some codecs from Intel and Microsoft.

The Register shared that some GitHub users noted in the project’s comments that this license actually violates the platform’s terms of service and that the repository download is not actually open source. This license was eventually revised to WCL 1.0.1, which changed the line to No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, either in source or binary form. This means that you can now build on the code that Winamp uploaded to GitHub, but you won’t be able to share it with anyone. So even though Winamp’s source code was online and visible to the world, it wasn’t fully open source, because you can’t freely redistribute the changes you make.

Aside from these licensing shenanigans, other GitHub users also noted that there were a few pieces of code in the Winamp version that they didn’t own (or no longer owned) in the first place. The Register says this includes server code for Shoutcast Distributed Network Audio Server (DNAS), which was originally developed by Nullsoft, the original owners of Winamp. The Llama Group eventually bought Winamp and Shoutcast, but it sold the latter to Azerion in 2022, meaning it no longer has the rights to the DNAS Shoutcast. Proprietary source codes from Microsoft and Intel have also been spotted in the repository, which could potentially put the Llama Group in a sticky situation with these giants.

It’s likely because of these issues that it removed the Winamp repository from GitHub and makes it unlikely that we’ll see any form of Winamp – classic or otherwise – on an open source platform. This old media player is just too old, with a lot of proprietary stuff from several other companies that won’t be very excited about having their code released to the world for free. It would take a huge investment and a lot of time to clean up the Winamp backend for an open source version, but would anyone do it knowing they wouldn’t make a cent?