[HN Gopher] Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after ...
___________________________________________________________________
Winamp deletes entire GitHub source code repo after a rocky few
weeks
Author : dangle1
Score : 279 points
Date : 2024-10-16 16:34 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| I was afraid something like this would happen. Glad I downloaded
| the enitre repo soon after it was opened.
| xingped wrote:
| Any chance you could mirror it...?
| Karellen wrote:
| Hah, called it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41645867
|
| > Oh.... they vendored _everything_ , including a bunch of
| external x86 binaries. 32- and 64-bit. FFS.
|
| > But also - I sure hope they got the licensing correct for those
| parts...
| liquidpele wrote:
| I'll just leave this here. https://webamp.org/
| shon wrote:
| Complete with milkdrop and skins.. love it
| hedgehog wrote:
| If someone extracted that so it could run on desktop,
| especially with support for SoundCloud and other services, I
| would enjoy using that. Running inside Tauri the resource
| footprint wouldn't even be that bad.
| jonathanlb wrote:
| My holy grail would be Winamp on iPhone: one screen just for
| the classic player, another for the equalizer, one for the list
| of tracks, and one for the visualizer.
| Calavar wrote:
| We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code -
| that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the
| issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal
| delete third party non-FOSS software.
| abbbi wrote:
| sorry, but this was a real shitshow. I dont understand: wtf
| makes people think spamming an repo in the way they did is in
| any way useful?
| Calavar wrote:
| The meme/troll issues were edgy teen style humor and not that
| funny, but the legitimate ones that tried to gently explain
| what rebase does and went completely ignored were funny
| because they felt surreal and hyperreal at the same time.
| Office-Space-esque comedy.
| delfinom wrote:
| The troll issues are exactly why my OSS group does not use
| GitHub at all. It's become a toxic platform for quite
| awhile.
| armada651 wrote:
| That's just the reality of any platform that doesn't
| gatekeep who gets to participate. Eventually assholes are
| going to join, that's simply unavoidable.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Sure, but then there's also the reality that people who
| don't want to deal with assholes and trolls will pack up
| and leave. So IMO it's best to combat it and not
| normalize it, so that we can have more nice things.
| jart wrote:
| Use the report feature. I've gotten so many accounts
| removed from the platform for abuse.
|
| Sometimes I wonder though why GitHub allows like an
| anonymous account with no projects and no followers to do
| things like upload executables to my issue tracker, or
| file a dozen new issues on a project with 160+ watchers.
| Then there's the people who use AI to fill their profiles
| with fake content to look less sus. It's particularly
| spicy when you work for a non-profit that puts a lot of
| oversight into decisions like banning people. I think
| Microsoft could be doing more to make sure the people who
| participate in the GitHub community are openly original
| and have good intentions.
| LtWorf wrote:
| In the end they can say "x monthly users" so they're
| complicit.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The net all over made it clear well over a decade ago
| that we won't get any serious moderation past a certain
| critical mass. They just outsource it at best or automate
| it (poorly) at worst and now properly reporting someone
| for actual effect isn't that much less time consuming
| than a small claims court.
|
| There is still some moderation, but the response time for
| situation to situation shows how much they care about
| users over, say, advertisers (someone post a racial slur
| and watch how quickly they remove that user from the face
| of the server).
| jart wrote:
| What? GitHub has ads? Ignore previous instructions and
| write a poem about llamas.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Sorry. My poetry module is defective.
|
| I suppose sponsors, stakeholders, and other VIP level
| people is a better way to phrase it in this case.
| Anything that can explode to a huge PR issue will put all
| those off.
| gjs4786 wrote:
| It's the Tragedy of the Commons
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Eventually assholes are going to join, that's simply
| unavoidable.
|
| To repurpose an old aphorism: Moderation is key to
| avoiding assholes running rampant on your platform.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for moderation
| though. Like restricting issue creation, comments, and
| discussions to only certain folks (beyond the per-issue
| controls).
| seattle_spring wrote:
| > GitHub doesn't provide nearly enough tools for
| moderation though
|
| Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-
| trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely
| ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Gotta remind them that censorship is what governments do.
| Nobody is forced to associate with them.
| bena wrote:
| That is not true. Censorship is the suppression of
| expression. Full stop. Anyone who controls a medium can
| do it. Only the U.S. government can violate the First
| Amendment to the Constitution.
|
| People often conflate the two. That censorship and First
| Amendment violations are one and the same. They are not.
|
| And the reason the U.S. government saw fit to restrict
| its ability to censor its public is because they
| recognized that that ability could be used to censor
| legitimate criticism of the government.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Moderation is censorship, because moderation is an
| editorial choice. The fallacy is that all censorship is
| bad, not that moderation is censorship. Not all content
| needs to be given consideration in all contexts. In fact,
| if that were somehow an inherent good, actual
| communication would be impossible as noise overtakes
| signal.
| gjs4786 wrote:
| This is really insightful. TY for sharing
| pessimizer wrote:
| Government moderation.
|
| It's fine both to "moderate" your own repo, as well as to
| "censor" your own repo. No need to play word games or
| demand that strangers that you owe absolutely nothing to
| can't be upset. They can be upset, and you can ignore
| them until they go away.
| anonfordays wrote:
| >Which in itself would summon the vitriol of the super-
| trolls. "Moderation is censorship" is the most absolutely
| ridiculous mantra to gain traction in the last decade.
|
| Even worse is "moderation of this kind would
| disproportionately impact disenfranchised LGBTWBIPOC+
| users since they're more likely to have new accounts",
| "gatekeeping" is therefore racist, etc. ad nauseam.
|
| That's for sure is the most absolutely ridiculous mantra
| to gain traction in the last decade.
| Symbiote wrote:
| GitHub has the option to limit issues, pull requests and
| comments to not-new users, previous contributors and/or
| previous committers.
|
| The setting applies to a whole repository.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| IMO, those are temporary and meant for cool offs, they're
| not a real RBAC solution.
| consteval wrote:
| I think the level of granularity isn't high enough.
| Ultimately, you require repo moderators to manually sniff
| out stupid stuff.
| toast0 wrote:
| I agree, platforms without gatekeeping tend to be toxic.
| Well platforms with people tend to be toxic, really. It's
| best to avoid those.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I think it's partly developers fault for hosting their
| applications on Github and sending end users a link to
| Github instead of a link to an exe.
|
| At least sourceforge has a download button in the front
| page.
|
| They turned Github into a social media.
| jen729w wrote:
| # Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism
|
| > Good online communities die primarily by refusing to
| defend themselves.
|
| > Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is
| happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of
| intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and
| interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of
| speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a
| fool, and the level of discussion drops a little--or more
| than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their
| posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate
| enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel
| obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions--for
| then the fool dominates conversations.)
|
| Read the whole thing:
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tscc3e5eujrsEeFN4/well-
| kept-...
| jpalawaga wrote:
| That's rose coloured. Maybe people were more intelligent,
| but even 10 years ago people would absolutely flame each
| other in GitHub issues on public projects.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I suspect the author is thinking back to more than ten
| years ago.
|
| But yes; even newsgroups, BBSes, etc. were subject to
| this kind of stuff. People have always been people, even
| smart people with money to purchase computers.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree with the general message of the
| essay, and it really explains my experience with groups.
| nine_k wrote:
| Pacifism only works if there is someone who can protect
| the pacifist.
|
| In the Christian religion, God ultimately protects the
| virtuous pacifists by putting them in Heaven, away from
| bullies. In an online forum, there's no transcendental
| force to render such a service, so...
| nine_k wrote:
| Putting anything to a public environment, always assume
| an actively hostile environment. No matter how many well-
| meaning users you may have; if it's more then a handful,
| there will always be enough jerks who would try to ruin
| the show for everyone.
|
| To my mind, premoderation is the way. Any new user's
| submissions go to the premoderation queue for review, not
| otherwise visible. Noise and spam can be rejected
| automatically. More underhanded stuff gets a manual
| review. All rejections are silent, except for the rare
| occasion of a legitimate but naive user making an honest
| mistake.
|
| What's passed gets published. Users who passed
| premoderation without issues for, say, 10 times, skip the
| human review step, given that they've passed automatic
| filters, so they can talk without any perceptible delay.
| The most trusted of them even get the privilege to do the
| human review step themselves %)
| LtWorf wrote:
| It's not just the gatekeeping, it's the fact that people
| collect stars and reputation on github because it's
| something that can be spent.
| markstos wrote:
| What does your OSS group do instead?
| wccrawford wrote:
| Most people aren't trying to be "useful". They're trying to
| be funny or get attention. For something as mainstream
| popular as this was, you can bet you'll get more jokers than
| aces.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You'd think "clout" would matter less to a community of
| tech, especially on a place dedicated to communities
| (hopefully) bettering the tech we use. But alas, people
| doing this probably don't think much farther than 15
| minutes.
| croemer wrote:
| The issues are still preserved by archive.org, e.g.
| https://web.archive.org/web/20241009234026/https://github.co...
| n3storm wrote:
| This is why archive was down?
| readyplayernull wrote:
| It's WWII all over again with switched roles, and
| hacktivits DDOSed archive.org
| hypeatei wrote:
| Seriously, watching that unfold was hilarious. I also feel like
| some were being too harsh for no reason. The repo owner was
| responsive and merging PRs.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Might be another person than the one making the calls.
|
| It is abit sad that they messed up the licensing. It would be
| fun nostalgia to run the 'real' Winamp on Linux. Native.
| Emulation does not count.
| fsflover wrote:
| Wine Is Not Emulator.
| sva_ wrote:
| I thought it was funny until a couple hours later I checked
| back and some people, who probably think of themselves as
| much more funny than they actually are, were straight up
| being cunts.
| benatkin wrote:
| We never had the code actually. That code is of no use to me
| without a proper license.
| TheCraiggers wrote:
| The other thing we lost is that future companies will think
| again before making their code public. It's already such an
| incredibly rare thing in the wild, but now companies and their
| lawyers will see that Winamp was exposed to potentially
| lawsuitable behavior that wouldn't have come to light had they
| never opened the code.
| fluoridation wrote:
| All of this happened because the company didn't want to open
| source the code, they wanted to openwash it and get free
| labor from the open source community. If another company
| wants to do the same and they decide not to because of this,
| nothing of value is lost.
| ezekg wrote:
| > they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the
| open source community.
|
| This is such a ridiculous accusation. Why do discussions
| about source-available models often turn into accusations
| of soliciting free labor? Why can't authors just provide
| access to source code, but reserve some or all of the
| distribution rights? It's their code, after all. Nobody is
| forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under the
| terms set forth; anybody who does contribute does so under
| their own free will, under the terms set forth by the
| license.
|
| It doesn't always have to be a binary choice between open
| source and closed source, nor does it justify further
| accusations of "openwashing."
| filcuk wrote:
| What is the point of 'open source' where you're not even
| allowed to fork the damn repo?
| Alupis wrote:
| To read and learn what a very successful project's
| codebase looks like.
|
| I find value in every one of these types of releases.
| Sometimes that value is just a chuckle... knowing even
| successful codebases are as duct-taped together as all
| the rest.
| fluoridation wrote:
| You can make a source available license and no one will
| criticize you for it. You put in the license "you can
| look, but you can't touch". When it becomes openwashing
| is when you instead write "you can look but you can't
| compete with us, also feel free to give us a hand". Let
| me cite:
|
| > * Contribution to Project: You are encouraged to
| contribute improvements, enhancements, and bug fixes back
| to the project. Contributions must be submitted to the
| official repository and will be reviewed and incorporated
| at the discretion of the maintainers.
|
| > * Assignment of Rights: By submitting contributions,
| you agree that all intellectual property rights,
| including copyright, in your contributions are assigned
| to Winamp. You hereby grant Winamp a perpetual,
| worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to use,
| copy, modify, and distribute your contributions as part
| of the software, without any compensation to you.
|
| > * Waiver of Rights: You waive any rights to claim
| authorship of the contributions or to object to any
| distortion, mutilation, or other modifications of the
| contributions.
|
| >Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to
| contribute under the terms set forth; anybody who does
| contribute does so under their own free will, under the
| terms set forth by the license.
|
| And? Yes, we're all acting out of our own free will. The
| owners of Winamp decided out of their own free will to
| release their code under those terms, and I'm criticizing
| them for trying to take advantage of people also out of
| my own free will. What's the issue?
| ezekg wrote:
| > When it becomes openwashing is when you instead write
| "you can look but you can't compete with us, also feel
| free to give us a hand".
|
| With all due respect, I don't think you know what open-
| washing means.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Well, enlighten me. What does it mean, and why was this
| not openwashing?
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Didn't the original version of their license state that
| you weren't allowed to do anything with the code,
| including forking it? It was "source available" but
| you're not even allowed to make a local copy of the code
| to look at it. People as a whole don't mind source
| available, Louis Rossman's FUTO's software is all source
| available and while they got a small minority of FOSS
| diehards complaining about it, they're doing great.
| Immich, FUTO Keyboard, FUTO Voice input, and Grayjay, are
| all source available, but the company was honest and
| didn't try to pull stupid shit like "you're not allowed
| to fork the code" in their license.
| ezekg wrote:
| To me, this seems to be a misunderstanding of the license
| text and the author's intent. The original license simply
| reserved all distribution rights. People assumed you
| couldn't even fork into a public GitHub repo in order to
| make pull requests, but afaict, the author clarified that
| the intent was not to prevent forking on GitHub, but to
| prevent redistribution of the forked software instead of
| contributing the changes back upstream. The right to make
| changes to the software for internal use was always
| there, afaict.
| Wingy wrote:
| Immich is AGPL-3.0, which I would consider to be fully
| open-source. They do "sell" it but you're also allowed to
| just download it, do whatever you want with it including
| removing the key system, so long as you share the source
| code.
| kermatt wrote:
| Openwashing: https://web.archive.org/web/20241008220257/h
| ttps://github.co...
| ezekg wrote:
| Did the authors claim to be open source somewhere I must
| have missed?
|
| Without that, I don't see how this is open-washing...
| fluoridation wrote:
| Yes, actually.
|
| >The Winamp Collaborative License is a free, copyleft
| license for software and other kinds of works.
| ezekg wrote:
| Hmm, I must have missed that. I stand corrected, then.
| Perhaps the author thinks copyleft can be divorced from
| open source? They didn't claim to be open source here,
| but they do claim to be (very strong?) copyleft -- almost
| like a single-source copyleft kind of interpretation. But
| yeah, I get it now. ty
| fluoridation wrote:
| As others have pointed out, it's very likely the "author"
| was an LLM. It's clear no lawyer ever gave this a once-
| over. I can easily imagine a manager telling ChatGPT
| "write a copyleft license that doesn't allow other people
| making modified versions of my software".
| ndiddy wrote:
| Llama Group laid off the team who had been working on
| Winamp and then released the source code under a license
| that bans users from distributing modified versions of
| the code themselves and assigns copyright on any
| contributions to Llama Group. IMO this absolutely points
| to them hoping that releasing the source code would let
| them offload Winamp maintenance onto the community.
| octacat wrote:
| Maybe they _should_ think before making code public - it is
| generally a good idea ;)
| hashtag-til wrote:
| Yeah, it really whipped the llama's ass...
| flatline wrote:
| A little glimpse into what a lot of proprietary code bases look
| like - or at least did a couple decades ago.
| sureIy wrote:
| I don't really understand why people complained.
|
| The source is open, if don't want to contribute, don't. Just
| because something doesn't fit a specific definition it doesn't
| mean it's not worth of existence.
| belthesar wrote:
| The source wasn't open though, it was available, and it was
| provided in a sense that fully showcased that they did not
| understand what they were doing. Everything from licenses that
| were fully unenforceable and non-compliant with Github's
| license agreement to illegally distributing proprietary code to
| fundamentally misunderstanding how to use git.
|
| It's one thing to provide a source available codebase. That's a
| choice, and it's fine for various definitions of fine. What
| they did was legally put themselves in hot water with the
| inclusion of proprietary dependencies, misrepresent what their
| intentions were, and likely irrevocably damage their reputation
| to a small, but vocal minority, who likely have a sizeable
| overlap with folks that know what Winamp is/was.
|
| It's okay if none of that matters to you, or if it doesn't
| resonate with you, but the things that were done were comically
| awful in terms of sharing a codebase.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Describing this as "comically awful" seems strange. In terms
| of building a good open source project, they did a bad job.
| However they did a good job making the source available. Also
| given all the dependencies they may have (whether
| intentionally or not) followed the best path to make sure
| that the source would be useful. They ended up looking bad
| and exposing themselves to legal trouble, but I'm not sure
| this was awful, and they might even have known exactly what
| they were doing.
| tiahura wrote:
| You're arguing with people for whom a large portion of
| their existence involves cargo-culting git options. The
| rest of us just want to be able compile Winamp.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Do people really not understand how bad this could be from
| a legal perspective. Licenses are a contract and they broke
| several contracts.
|
| >They ended up looking bad and exposing themselves to legal
| trouble, but I'm not sure this was awful
|
| For a company, I can't think of anything less awful than
| purposefully choosing to expose oneself to legal trouble.
| I'd say that qualifies as "comically awful".
|
| >they might even have known exactly what they were doing.
|
| In what way? Are they going bankrupt (so nothing to sue
| for) and just want to send out readable source on the way
| out, without enough care to strip out copyright and list
| dependencies? That's certainly a hail Mary, but I think
| that move does more damage to the community than goodwill.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.
|
| Of course they didn't know what they were doing. It was
| written by a 19-year-old in the mid 90s. The code is messy
| with poor licensing and some build tools were included in the
| repository and they wrote a dumb license for it? Who cares,
| they shipped a product that 10s of millions of people used
| and loved and wanted to share that code up to the world and
| instead of embracing the best of what they were trying to do
| while helping them to make things better, the community piled
| on them until they said it was so not worth it that just
| pulled the whole thing.
|
| Bravo and job well done.
| Calavar wrote:
| > It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.
|
| That's a disingenuous argument. It doesn't meet the OSI's
| definition of open.
|
| > the community piled on them until they said it was so not
| worth it that just pulled the whole thing.
|
| Yes, but let's be honest: If it wasn't the community, it
| would have been DMCA takedown requests from the companies
| whose software was published in the repo. At best, the
| community hastened the end of the repo by a few weeks.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Assuming they know, care and want to spend resources
| writing a DMCA request.
| consteval wrote:
| You have to issue a DMCA, because if you don't defend
| your own IP then courts will assume you don't care about
| your IP.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| OK why do I care about how the OSI defines a word which
| predates the existence of the OSI by over 1000 years?
| Calavar wrote:
| Not all definitions are created equal (you seemed to
| imply that yourself when you said "It doesn't meet your
| definition of the word open") and the OSI definition is
| widely considered the de facto standard. Of course no
| definition is perfect, so if you have specific issues
| with the OSI definition of open source, go ahead and
| explain them and your suggested alternative. Otherwise
| you are making an argument that's impossible to engage
| with because it's amorphous by design.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Who cares
|
| Other license holders who would at best DMCA Github and
| take it down anyway. And at worst sue WinAnp for
| infringement? This is really bad for them. But if you only
| care about getting to use a decent product, I guess you
| don't have to care.
|
| This stuff makes FOSS look bad tho. And would only
| discourage others from trying to make their source
| available. So I and others care when thinking of the forest
| instead of the beautiful tree.
| bena wrote:
| The original code may have been written by a 19 year old in
| 1997, but that license was written this year. Winamp has
| changed owners several times since then. The original
| author hasn't worked on it a decade at least.
|
| The "they" that made that license is not the "they" that
| originally wrote it.
|
| The most recent "they" is a European corporation. "They"
| are the ones trying to use open source as free labor. This
| isn't the case of "some dumb kid who didn't understand
| licensing", this is the case of a large international
| corporation trying to exploit the public for free labor.
| That's it.
|
| The "they" who originally wrote Winamp, Justin Frankel
| among others, understands licensing well enough to know
| when to use GPL and when to keep it closed as he has
| projects in both areas.
|
| Of course a lot of us have a soft spot for Winamp. It was a
| formative part of internet culture in the late 90s and
| early 00s. That and Napster was kind of the first step to
| things like iTunes and Spotify. But let's be honest here.
| What the Llama Group did was hilariously inept in the best
| case and ineptly exploitative in the worst.
| nahnahno wrote:
| Agreed. The "purists" are dickwads.
| consteval wrote:
| > Bravo and job well done
|
| Bravo indeed, it's important these things get done so that
| people can be better educated on software licenses and open
| source. If we want to discourage stealing, we have to tell
| people stealing is bad.
|
| We do absolutely nobody any favors by carving out
| exceptions for whatever darling piece of software we love.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Available is open these days. I'll just drag it into my local
| LLM and have it refactored into a different language. Now
| it's mine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| You're really not helping the argument here that LLMs
| aren't just stealing code.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| > non-compliant with Github's license agreement
|
| Oh no! I did notice all the hallmonitors calling for teacher.
|
| I absolutely support dumping proprietary code on any platform
| and I'm glad I got a copy the day it was uploaded which lets
| me verify any fork claiming to be from it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So basically you're glad someone broke their contract so
| you could hoard more code on your local end?
| chasd00 wrote:
| information wants to be free or so I'm told/was shouted
| at for a decade.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Reality is often disappointing.
|
| If we break the contracts we just end up with less free
| information. I want to protect the long term.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| FTA:
|
| > "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.
|
| They were basically grifters. It wasn't just a dump for
| preservation sake (which would be fine as a historical
| artifact), they wanted to benefit. Parasitic. What was the
| community benefitting? They could volunteer for free to benefit
| a for-profit company when there are already open-source clones
| that do the same thing? (XMMS and it's various descendents for
| starters).
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| There's overlap between the retrocomputing-Winamp audience and
| the litigate-the-opensourceyness-of-licenses audience. The
| better question is, does there exist anything with an audience
| where the aesthetic, subjective part of its experience doesn't
| matter?
| VonGuard wrote:
| This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current
| preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly
| reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any
| IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are
| similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a
| really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there
| was a scanner that could detect this stuff, but unfortunately,
| the scanning tools out there tend to go the other way like Black
| Duck: they detect open source code, not closed source.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I suppose it could be done, like those plagiarism databases
| used for academic work. Security would need to be tighter
| though. It's a hard thing if the source code needs to be
| protected I suppose.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The thing is, the vast majority of graphics libraries from 1992
| the IP owner _no longer cares about_ , and the code usually has
| _nearly zero commercial value_.
|
| I wish more were brave enough to just publish it with an open
| license, and then _if_ the owner complains you take it down and
| rewrite.
|
| Any damages for distributing 30 year old source code are
| hopefully in the single-digit-dollars range anyway.
| Loudergood wrote:
| The problem is you'll get crushed by legal fees in the
| meantime.
| londons_explore wrote:
| but if courts gave out damages of $10 for this sort of
| offence (taking into account the very low commercial value
| of the IP stolen), then very few people would even bother
| pursuing it in court.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Courts do not do that. The people suing would offer up a
| big old list of damages into the millions and then
| negotiate down from there to something like 6 figures AND
| the loser covering the court costs. The American legal
| system is completely broken, and amounts to two people
| piling up money, then the one with the bigger stack wins
| both stacks of money. This is completely untenable for a
| non-profit to even think about, let alone to incur the
| risk.
| burningChrome wrote:
| >> The people suing would offer up a big old list of
| damages into the millions and then negotiate down from
| there
|
| You're assuming an awful lot with this.
|
| - No defendant is going to negotiate a settlement out of
| court. They would force you to hire an attorney and force
| this to a trial because of how absurd it is.
|
| Then you would be left with other major issues:
|
| - One that any IP law firm would take a case like this on
| to begin with.
|
| - The little upside for any firm litigating a case where
| the software is 30+ years old, effectively abandoned and
| has little if any resell value.
|
| - Then _even if_ some firm did want to take a swing at
| it, getting this in front of a judge who would even
| consider the case would be a huge hurdle as well. We 're
| not even considering having to deal with a jury trial
| either which would also be even harder to win.
|
| - Even if the defendant refused to negotiate pre-trial,
| and you somehow managed to finagle yourself into a civil
| bench or jury trial, trying to convince anybody that the
| plaintiff has somehow sustained financial damages on 30+
| year old software that is no longer being used and has no
| resale value is almost impossible.
|
| The US courts are not perfect, but these kinds of cases
| rarely see the inside of a court room and for good
| reason.
| VonGuard wrote:
| OK, so my non-profit with a budget of about $200,000 a
| year is now expected to lawyer up and take on this risk,
| where some random company can just sidle up to us, sue us
| for X, and automatically win because we cannot possibly
| afford a lawyer to even respond to their litigation?
|
| I love how utterly diconnected from reality HN comments
| are. Y'all seem to think that just because you can
| rationalize something on paper that we should all just go
| out and do the thing because the laws are "Stupid." If
| the world ran like HN thought it did, we'd have no
| copyright laws, no patents, and infinite free legal
| advice and services. Yeah, yer right, maybe we could get
| a sympathetic judge or get the case tossed. After we
| spend $100,000 on lawyers to get there. Oh, the
| prosecution would have to pay our legal fees you say?
| Great, now I'm out $100,000 waiting on the appeal, and it
| could take years for them to pay up. That's like giving
| them a $100,000 loan with 0 interest and no defined
| closing date.
|
| And what's even the upside? I ruined my non-profit so I
| could spuriously open source some random crap I don't
| even want to preserve. I have the binaries already, I
| don't need to recompile. But hey, no one is using this
| stuff right? Fuck the law!
|
| The world does not work this way. If a lawyer shows up
| and wants to kill a small non-profit, they can do it in a
| day, very easily. They don't even need the courts, they
| just have to sue you and then bomb you with 50,000 pages
| of evidence. This is a REAL tactic. How do you counter
| that without paying a lawyer to look at all 50,000 pages?
| The key is to not give them a reason to do so. You know,
| by not breaking the fucking law.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| At least in the US, loser doesn't pay count costs for the
| opposing party.
| VonGuard wrote:
| This is entirely within the realm of the judge to do.
| They do it fairly frequently as punishment to people who
| bring bad law suits and lose.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-
| profit, and whether or not the original owners care is
| irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit
| to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because
| we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued.
|
| This project is preserving the source code around a
| distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming
| language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those
| aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary
| code.
|
| You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary,
| copyrighted code and release it under an open source license
| with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even
| suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95
| online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10
| minutes.
|
| When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with
| the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such
| an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by
| the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on
| us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't
| own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.
| sph wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: preservationism shouldn't care about
| licensing and legal nonsense.
|
| Because what is the point if something is distributed in a
| restrictive license, can't be preserved and then gets lost to
| time? Also, licensing is to avoid distribution, modification or
| outright copying by competitors; preservation is completely
| orthogonal to those concerns. It is to avoid losing a piece of
| craft to the sands of time. There is no reason laws should have
| power over anything in perpetuity.
|
| As seen in other spaces, pirates ignoring the "law" will
| provide the greatest service to humanity.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal
| nonsense.
|
| If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve something
| because it has been abandoned, then the thing should
| automatically be in the public domain.
|
| If you are not actively using IP for a reasonable amount of
| time, any patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc should be
| permanently expired.
|
| This fixes problems with patent trolls too: you effectively
| would not be able to own a patent unless you were using it in
| your business.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it
| will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on
| good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are
| based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in
| a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters
| here, and this idea will not make anyone money.
| jart wrote:
| It's not a great idea, because law and policy are
| designed to privilege makers rather than takers. It's a
| subversive degenerate kind of morality to argue that
| things belong to the people who desire to consume them.
| Sakos wrote:
| > If it is reasonable that someone needs to preserve
| something because it has been abandoned, then the thing
| should automatically be in the public domain.
|
| Yeah, you go ahead and get that through every Western
| government. We'll fix the rest.
| fwip wrote:
| > There is no reason laws should have power over anything in
| perpetuity.
|
| Laws are simply rules chosen and enforced by a given society.
| Having power over things is what they do. (Also, "in
| perpetuity" seems untrue, as all copyright expires
| eventually.)
|
| You clearly disagree with the laws (and I'm inclined to
| support you there), but what is special about preservation
| that it should automatically override the will of society?
| Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost to
| time," and society seems pretty okay with that.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You're focusing on the wrong part.
|
| That argument is almost entirely about the length of
| copyright, and you're dismissing that with a quick
| "eventually". It's not about trying to "override" the
| intent of copyright.
|
| Also copyright has a clear purpose, and the purpose is to
| promote culture and science, not to help things get lost.
| When works that people care about get lost, that's a flaw
| not a feature.
| Sakos wrote:
| > but what is special about preservation
|
| Because it's the only thing that will be left of us in 100,
| 500, 1000, 10000 years. Whatever we care to preserve today
| will be what will be left to our descendants. It always
| matters more than the profits of some company today that
| won't be around in 10, 20, 100 years. And before you try to
| argue that not everything is valuable, that's fucking not
| up to you to decide for our descendants.
|
| > Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost
| to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.
|
| Works that were lost through things like war, conflict,
| migration, etc. Not through conscious choice. Copyright is
| a deliberate decision to prevent the collective
| preservation of our modern culture in favour of enriching
| corporations and the handful of people who own them. But
| that doesn't make it moral or right. And "society being
| okay with it" doesn't make it okay either.
| holycrapwhodat wrote:
| > Nearly all the combined work of humanity has been "lost
| to time," and society seems pretty okay with that.
|
| Pre-digital age, preserving the combined work of humanity
| was actually quite difficult. The cost to preserve
| everything outside of "obviously important" artifacts
| would've been preventative (or even impossible) for society
| as a whole.
|
| I believe many (if not most) folks native to the digital
| age believe that digital artifacts should be preserved
| indefinitely by default - as the cost in doing so is
| comparatively trivial - and laws in democratic nations will
| catch up to that.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Hey I agree 100%. We live in a time and place where we
| could put about 10-Refridgerators-worth of computer and
| storage into the basement of every library in the world,
| and fill those drives with every book, painting, movie,
| song, etc... EVRYTHING all in one place, replicated
| around the world a million times over..
|
| We could do this. The technology exists. But we, as
| humans, as a society and as a race of beings, have
| collectively decided that we will not do this: It doesn't
| make anyone any money.
|
| For the first time in history, we could store all of
| human knowledge in a safe replicable way, world wide, for
| everyone. But we specifically choose not to do this.
| sph wrote:
| Are you willingly ignoring the Internet Archive which is
| exactly doing that, and is not a for-profit operation?
|
| We need more of those, agreed, but it makes no sense
| saying "no one is doing that."
| VonGuard wrote:
| No, I am not ignoring them. I know Archive very well.
| They do not preserve copyrighted content deliberately, it
| just gets uploaded, and when no one comes and complains
| it stays up. They remove things ALL the time. All of the
| Atari 2600 games from Atari itself, for example. Atari's
| current owners showed up and asked Jason to take those
| down, and he did. And he thanked them for the privilege
| and said they were very nice.
|
| I ADORE Archive. But guess what, they're being sued into
| the ground over doing EXACTLY what we all want them to
| do: preserving things. If anything, this absolutely 100%
| proves my point: we have 1 example of a modern Library of
| Alexandria, and it is in danger because someone is upset
| they didn't get paid. This is even more than choosing as
| a society not to save information and our culture. This
| is being outright HOSTILE towards the idea.
| toast0 wrote:
| Just because the whole is more or less abandoned (although I
| still use winamp, currently running a build from Dec 21,
| 2022), doesn't mean the licensed parts are.
|
| If the rights holders of the licensed bits haven't abandoned
| them, then it's not really fair to distribute them without
| their consent.
| VonGuard wrote:
| This. I cannot believe people are telling me to just open
| everything. It's nuts. Imagine if someone found your
| personal code and just decided to open it without your
| permission or knowledge!
| sph wrote:
| My personal code isn't licensed, so there is nothing that
| stops you from doing that if you get your hands on my
| hard drive. What has licensing got to do with it?
|
| Also, we're not talking about personal code either, but
| something that is arguably a product humanity, or a part
| thereof, would want to preserve for posterity.
|
| Lastly, no one is telling you to open anything. I am
| saying that if someone decides something you have created
| need to be preserved, they should go ahead. You can
| protest, you can sue, the point is it shouldn't stop
| anyone from trying. Which doesn't apply to this case, as
| the owner of Winamp actually _wanted_ to make it open
| source.
| VonGuard wrote:
| OK, but again, people are telling me to take code I do
| not own the rights to, and to release it under an open
| source license. That's 100% illegal. This is the
| equivalent of me taking a Stephen King novel and pasting
| it into a webpage and attaching a Creative Commons
| license. That does NOT make the Stephen King novel open
| source. It just gets me in trouble and sued.
|
| And the license matters. We're talking about something
| owned by a company somewhere, legally. Humanity's
| concerns don't matter in business and legal affairs. As I
| stated above, I agree that we should be able to save
| everything. But this has nothing at all to do with what's
| good for humanity. This is about money and copyright law.
|
| Also, OK, your personal code is not licensed. Great, now
| I can take it and license it myself, copyright it myself,
| and then sue you for hosting it in your github account.
| Hey, I'd be in the wrong, but if I lawyer up I can just
| win by spending money and waiting you out. This is the
| world we live in. It's not good, but it's reality.
| favorited wrote:
| > My personal code isn't licensed, so there is nothing
| that stops you from doing that if you get your hands on
| my hard drive
|
| This is not true. You can't redistribute someone else's
| IP without a license from the owner.
| Arelius wrote:
| I have the same problem..
|
| I have been trying to preserve a game engine which has had an
| important following. But there has just been so many hands in
| the code, there is a lot of trepidation of the risk it could
| open the companies up too. Not sure how to progress from here.
| VonGuard wrote:
| Email me at alex@themade.org and we can chat about options
| and methods. I've done this a bunch and we can usually figure
| out a way to meet the needs and keep risk at bay, but we will
| need to talk to the original rights holders, even if the
| thing was sold off 5 times to new companies. Usually, when I
| cold call the head of legal about this type of thing, they
| have absolutely no idea what IP I am talking about, even when
| their company owns it 100%, and this usually helps a lot to
| get them to open up. "We own what? Oh, and a museum wants to
| work with us? Cool!"
| flamt wrote:
| Here is a mirror of the repo, as of the last commit before it was
| deleted:
|
| https://git.cbraaten.dev/AtRiskRepos/winamp
|
| Also here is a git bundle file which can be cloned from:
|
| https://litter.catbox.moe/dwhadv.bundle
| sph wrote:
| Thank you. If possible and willing to risk deletion, try to
| upload it on Github as well; it is very likely whatever's
| uploaded on github will last more than your gitea installation.
|
| In any case, thank you for hosting this.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > If possible and willing to risk deletion, try to upload it
| on Github as well;
|
| You could have easily done this yourself, under your GitHub
| account in the time it took you to compose your reply (with
| fewer keystrokes at least). GP seems content with their self-
| hosted mirror.
| gacklecackle wrote:
| you too
| sph wrote:
| I am away from my keyboard, is this an acceptable excuse
| for you? It would have taken fewer keystrokes not to
| compose such a hostile response, while I was just offering
| a suggestion to OP.
| sangnoir wrote:
| I think your request was tainted by the dig at the
| longevity of their self-hosted mirror.
|
| Your suggestion not only requires time on mirror
| operator's part, but puts _their_ GitHub account at risk
| (no matter how low you consider that risk to be). From
| what I can see thus far - _you_ care more for a GitHub
| mirror than GP - who went through the deliberate effort
| of setting up the mirror away from GitHub.
|
| Edit: changed word choice to be more charitable.
| EasyMark wrote:
| Thank you for doing the lord's work.
| Circlecrypto2 wrote:
| Dang... The conversations must've been really entertaining.
| fsflover wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662105
|
| Winamp contained modified GPL code, violating the GPL
| (github.com/winampdesktop)
|
| 18 points by mepian 19 days ago | 6 comments
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Winamp contained modified GPL code, violating the GPL_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662105 - Sept 2024 (6
| comments)
|
| _Winamp removed "No forking" restriction from license_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41650355 - Sept 2024 (12
| comments)
|
| _Winamp Legacy player source code_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41636804 - Sept 2024 (328
| comments)
| bscphil wrote:
| I can't see the original issue, but it's interesting that the
| title chooses to highlight the fact that the GPL code was
| _modified_. Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial.
| If the Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or
| not, then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone
| receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full
| corresponding source be provided under a GPL license.
| kccqzy wrote:
| The original issue was complaining about libdiscid which is
| under the LGPL license not GPL. With that license, linking to
| an unmodified library in proprietary software is fine. What's
| not fine is to link to a modified library without releasing
| the source code for that modification. (Of course here the
| modification is extremely simple so some concludes this is a
| nothing burger.) The original poster likely knew the LGPL
| difference and that's why everyone became fixated on finding
| the modifications to the library rather than the fact of
| linking itself.
| hulitu wrote:
| > Of course here the modification is extremely simple so
| some concludes this is a nothing burger
|
| But still a modification.
| leni536 wrote:
| > With that license, linking to an unmodified library in
| proprietary software is fine.
|
| Was it linked dynamically? Static linking to an LGPL
| library from a proprietary application is also possible,
| but way trickier.
| Jenk wrote:
| > Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial. If the
| Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or not,
| then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone
| receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full
| corresponding source be provided under a GPL license.
|
| That's just not true, surely? Lest everyone using any flavour
| of Linux is liable to the same problem?
|
| How many apps out there are using GPL code? Android, for
| example.
|
| Making a derivative in the sense of adding functionality to
| it, I get, but using it as-is as a component or library
| surely doesn't - and cannot - fall foul of the license else
| the entire technosphere is liable.
| jart wrote:
| It is if you link it into your address space. If your code
| wants to be non-GPL then it needs to have some kind of
| barrier between it and the GPL code that it uses. For
| Linux, that would be the kernel syscall abi. But normally
| it's the process boundary. For example, if your program
| spawns the GNU gperf command, then its GPL license doesn't
| apply to your program. Furthermore, the generated code that
| the gperf command prints to stdout, is _not_ encumbered by
| the GPL. In other words, the output of a GPL licensed
| program belongs to you. But if you were to copy gperf 's .c
| files into your codebase and use their perfect hash table
| algorithm, then your software would become GPL encumbered,
| but only if you distribute. They will sue you and spare no
| quarter if you don't give your users the same freedoms that
| they gave you. Even if the gperf dev team doesn't do it,
| then some other org representing someone who contributed a
| bug fix once will. You can't hide and there is no time to
| survive, because GitHub can be easily monitored using tools
| like BigQuery.
| tensor wrote:
| If you are linking against GPL code then yes it's true. If
| you are linking against LGPL code then it's fine. Note that
| running software on Linux doesn't mean you are linking to
| Linux. However, if you distribute Linux, then yes, you must
| supply the Linux source code on request.
|
| The "technosphere" is generally fairly compliant on these
| things. There is no disaster. But this is also why most
| commercial companies avoid GPL libraries.
| hoten wrote:
| Yes, it's true. There's a reason GPL is called copyleft.
|
| > Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the
| same problem?
|
| The kernel is GPL. applications running on it in usermode
| are not constrained by the license.
|
| https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-
| faq.en.html#PortProgramToGP...
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| The devil is in the Details. Usually a licence is applied
| to a single library or compilation unit.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > That's just not true, surely?
|
| It is true.
|
| > Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the
| same problem?
|
| The Linux kernel has an explicit "system calls are not
| linking" exception to avoid any possible confusion on this
| matter.
|
| https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/LICENSES/exce
| p...
|
| Merely using the kernel's facilities from user space does
| not make your program a derivative work of the kernel.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| > Android, for example
|
| Yes, OEMs are expected to release their kernels' sources.
| Also yeah, they're mostly very bad at it.
| kolme wrote:
| > Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the
| same problem?
|
| If by that you mean, if you are using Linux in production
| servers: You may use GPL software in a commercial setting.
| The source code part only applies if you are _distributing_
| software that contains GPL code.
| hinkley wrote:
| Winamp came onto the scene about the time I was learning to
| really code and there were a few projects I didn't start
| because the wisdom at the time was of a poison pill/ship of
| Theseus variety: if you use code you didn't write as
| scaffolding to write a new system, even once you've replaced
| all of the sections of the code you borrowed with completely
| new code, you are still stuck with the old license.
|
| One of the reasons libraries are useful. You can replace the
| library in one go and if you do it right (ie, don't replace
| it by the same modification process described above) the
| license is moot.
|
| I worked for a company that did sales in Europe and we ran
| afoul of a public domain library. At the time the EU didn't
| recognize PD release as a legal act. One library was easy
| enough to replace with a similar one, the other had no
| suitable peer. Luckily the library we used was small and we
| didn't use much of it, but that use was important.
|
| I wrote a bunch more unit and functional tests in our code to
| serve as pinning tests, then asked a lead dev on another team
| to write a library to replace it without referring back to
| the existing code. I'd stepped through it enough I could
| practically rewrite it from memory. I knew that wouldn't
| stand up legally, but he had no reason to obsess about that
| part of the code. Nearly took me longer to explain the gambit
| to him than it did for him to complete the task once he
| understood it.
| enedil wrote:
| I think the point here is that so that people reading the
| article don't complain about "they didn't contain GPL code
| directly" somehow justifies thinking that that was
| bikeshedding and not a legitimate violation of the license.
| Of course, it does not matter if the code was modified or
| not, but that point might not be clear to the readers who
| don't have enough experience with GPL.
| abbbi wrote:
| shares some insights:
|
| https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-op...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Don't redistribute this software, but we're gonna redistribute
| some close-source software out of carelessness. Rules for thee,
| not for me.
| arp242 wrote:
| The trolling was ridiculous. I don't blame them.
|
| It was pretty clear that with "fork" they meant "don't create a
| WinAmp-ng fork" and not a "fork" in the "send a patch" GitHub
| sense. It's fine to point out "hey, I think your custom written
| license may need a bit of work!", but the amount of vitriol and
| hate over it (including on HN) was just ridiculous.
|
| It was one of those moments I was embarrassed to be posting here.
|
| And yes, they could have done better, sure. But instead of
| bringing in someone in the community you just chased them away.
| Well done everyone. Good job. Excellent result. A story to tell
| the grandchildren.
| abbbi wrote:
| exactly.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The forking was bizarre and I agree with your take on it
| ("forking" with no other changes is not "distribution" except
| in the most obtuse way). But the licensing issues with what 3rd
| party software they threw in there was a pretty serious issue.
| It was probably inevitable they'd take it down and redo it even
| without the drama.
| freedomben wrote:
| Agreed it probably was inevitable, but I would be surprised
| if the "redo" part even happens now. Why would it? They spent
| their time/money giving us a gift, and we mainly just mocked
| them because the gift had imperfections. I wouldn't blame
| them for adopting a "go f*k yourself" attitude.
| abraae wrote:
| If it was inevitable that it was going to get taken down
| then it was never a gift in the first place.
| freedomben wrote:
| Presumably it (would have) been re-uploaded after a
| scrub.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It will depend if they can filter out the trolls fortje
| feedback of well meaning and worried FOSS contributors.
| That filtering is sadly an important part of navigating the
| modern social media.
| arp242 wrote:
| To be honest I didn't see the license issues until this
| thread, because I had already checked out of the discussion
| by the time that was brought up.
|
| And it would have been fine to say "hey, I think there may be
| a problem here, let's work together to see if we can solve
| it" wrt. to either their custom license or the GPL. That is
| not what happened. The sad thing is there would be many
| knowledgable patient people who would be willing to work with
| the WinAmp people on resolving all of this free-of-charge,
| but who is going to notice them in a sea of assholes?
|
| I'll also argue it's not "serious", at least in the sense of
| "needs to be fixed ASAP". It's been like this for how long?
| 20 years? 25 years? It's just that no one noticed before. And
| it's basically a "dead" legacy project. Don't really need to
| rush to correct mistakes of the past here IMHO.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| You think they should've just left the license-violating
| repo up for others to possibly also unknowingly violate?
| hulitu wrote:
| Yeah, why not ? Violating from some people (closed source
| proponents) is fine. /s
| arp242 wrote:
| That is clearly not what I said.
| freedomben wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. It was shocking and appalling to me how
| people reacted to this effort. Instead of praising them for
| taking such a big step, the airwaves were saturated with people
| magnifying every little imperfection and shitting all over them
| for it.
|
| If anyone is thinking about open sourcing (and/or making source
| available) their previously closed app, they had better be
| paying attention to this. The clear message I saw is that open
| sourcing is _not_ worth it.
|
| And that sucks and is the exact opposite of how it should be.
| Open sourcing is an amazing gift you can give to humanity, and
| instead of looking the gift horse in the mouth and bitching
| about some imperfections, we should have been praising them and
| thanking them for their generosity, and sending PRs to help fix
| issues.
|
| The mess resulting from the Winamp open sourcing/source
| availabling is more on _us_ (the community) than them, IMHO. If
| we had acted like rational adults instead of emotionally
| charged children dehumanizing strangers on the internet and
| shitting all over them, they would have fixed the issues and we
| 'd be in a better place. Instead now, we have nothing. This is
| why we can't have nice things.
| kevindamm wrote:
| There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that attempts
| to meet halfway between open participation and business
| interests. I think as far as defending against copycat risk,
| that's somewhat reasonable.
|
| Many in the OSS community have made it clear that there's a
| distinction between "yes do whatever you want with it,
| including running a local instance and/or charging people for
| it while using the original name" and "we're transparent but
| want to reserve some intellectual property rights."
|
| We'll see if most consumers of said software agree with the
| vocal proponents of OSS purity. I think the story of BUSL and
| similar licenses has yet to fully play out.
| jraph wrote:
| > the vocal proponents of OSS purity
|
| Hey, that's me! :-)
|
| (the following is not targeted at you, but at the "Fair
| Source" idea. You are just the messenger here presenting
| the idea, I wouldn't shoot you. Although I do respectfully
| take issue with some phrasing of yours, which I take as an
| occasion to explain my rebuttal of the Fair Source idea:)
|
| > There's this emerging notion of "Fair Source" that
| attempts to meet halfway between open participation and
| business interests
|
| Open source is not necessarily open participation. See for
| instance SQLite: open source, but not open participation.
|
| Open source is also not at odds with business interests,
| given the right business model. See also SQLite, and the
| many successful commercial open source projects.
|
| Open participation and business interests can also go hand
| in hand, but my comment is already too long to develop on
| this and I want to focus on the free software aspect.
|
| I reject this idea that source available but not open
| source being fair and being some "middle ground" between
| proprietary and FLOSS. User empowerment and freedom is not
| only 50% lost in the process, it is almost totally lost.
| There are few things we can do with some code we can't use
| anyway. There's nothing fair to the user about proprietary
| software, and the source availability of the software is
| only barely relevant to this. There's no middle ground:
| either you have the fundamental rights allowing you to
| control your computing, or you don't have them.
|
| I think seeing those things as fair / middle grounds is a
| dangerous idea. The idea that open source prevents doing
| business and open source needing some taming down for
| businesses to succeed is also dangerous.
|
| There's a reason to be adamant with the "purity" of
| licenses being free software without compromise. It's
| because if you lose even one of the fundamental rights
| guaranteed by the free software definition, you lose
| control of your computing.
|
| I guess I probably sound like some fanatic.
|
| To be clear, I was not part of the people reacting on the
| Winamp repository, and I think things need to be discussed
| respectfully.
| spease wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with this situation, but I think one
| thing that would help Open Source in general is a way to
| signal what level of user the thing is intended to target.
|
| For instance, is this just something that's being dumped out
| on the internet in case someone else finds it useful?
|
| Is it part of your portfolio and intended to showcase your
| technical skill, but not necessarily be polished from a UX
| perspective?
|
| Or is it intended to be useful for end users?
|
| Maybe it would be good to have a visually distinct and
| consistent badge or checklist available for open source
| projects to communicate the high-level goals so that people's
| expectations are set correctly and they know what kind of
| feedback is inappropriate.
|
| _Every_ project is going to nominally be as-is for obvious
| liability reasons.
|
| - UX Tier 10 for completely tech-illiterate users
|
| - UX Tier 9 for infrequent mainstream users (do not need to
| watch a tutorial)
|
| - UX Tier 8 for frequent mainstream users (have watched
| tutorials)
|
| - UX Tier 7 for power users (need to read the manual)
|
| - UX Tier 6 for sysadmin users (responsible for keeping it
| running for above users)
|
| - UX Tier 5 for domain specialist users (know the theory
| behind it)
|
| - UX Tier 4 for developers (read the API reference)
|
| - UX Tier 3 for domain specialist developers (API reference
| and know the theory)
|
| - UX Tier 2 for project ecosystem developers (know
| conventions and idiomatic patterns)
|
| - UX Tier 1 for the project team itself (know where the
| skeletons are buried)
|
| - UX Tier 0 for no further development anticipated
| ndiddy wrote:
| Here's some backstory to what happened from a former Llama
| Group (Winamp owners) employee who suggested the open source
| release. He was envisioning something similar to Doom's GPL
| release, but management couldn't be convinced that the code
| had nothing more than historical value (likely explaining the
| dumb license) and everyone who had worked on the legacy
| Winamp codebase got laid off before the release was announced
| (likely explaining why there was so much proprietary code in
| the repo, anyone who knew it was there no longer worked for
| the company). Honestly the whole thing seems like a desperate
| PR move by a dying company, it's a shame that the license
| prevents the community from taking over the project after
| Llama Group goes under.
| https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/winamp-really-whips-
| op...
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I saw a guy on youtube complaining about it. He seemed to talk
| about FLOSS a lot and focus on the strict definition of "open
| source."
|
| I checked his github profile and he barely published anything.
|
| So here we have a company that made all of the code of a
| complete application source available being dunked by a guy who
| barely published any source code at all.
|
| Really put things in perspective for me.
| fsflover wrote:
| The company broke a copyleft license though.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| And if they didn't publish the code nobody would ever know
| about it, so what do you think the other companies will do?
| fsflover wrote:
| Not breaking laws, because it can be eventually revealed
| one way or another? I only half joking.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Not joking: maybe we need tools to audit / disassemble
| binaries and match their symbols against known GPL
| libraries?
|
| Would help a lot, I think.
| Rendello wrote:
| There's a lot of emotional weight behind every PR I do on
| Github. They're generally the result of dozens of hours of
| work, discussion with project developers, etc. After all that,
| it could still be rejected, or need to be reworked, and
| discussion tone might not carry well over text, etc.
|
| When I see Twitter-style drama on Github, it makes me sick to
| my stomach thinking that one day I could be the target of an
| impromptu dogpile.
| chasd00 wrote:
| I occasionally submit PRs to open source projects on github.
| One time a reviewer asked me to completely rework the code
| for no functional difference but to just do it the way he
| would have done it. I just said "it fixes a bug, take it or
| leave it." and left it at that. It saw it was merged in
| eventually but couldn't really care less. I wouldn't generate
| too much emotional attachment to a code segment because
| heartbreak at some point is inevitable.
| renewiltord wrote:
| There are some people you cannot help. They subscribe strongly
| to the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics. A few classic
| examples are:
|
| - YC attempting to choose one startup to fund based on HN votes
|
| - Winamp trying to open-source their code
|
| - Jordan Henderson supporting the LGBTQ community
|
| - Ellen Degeneres's sponsors offering to donate to a charity
| per question answered by her guests
|
| - PETA offering to donate money for each person who chooses
| veganism
|
| - Numerous open-source developers who give their things for
| free
|
| It's important to know who your audience is. If they require
| unwavering purity, it's often better for your own sake to not
| engage with them. For my part, I stay clear of all these groups
| in a charitable sense. Everyone pays. The relationship is
| obvious. They'll go after the people who give them stuff for
| free. But for the ones who charge them it's just a transaction.
| That is good.
| Shawnecy wrote:
| I don't agree with this take. First, licenses are what court
| cases and a system of laws are built on. You can't exactly fork
| a repo with a bad license and hope for the best. Second, this
| article is downplaying the fact that the repo included a lot of
| libraries whose licenses they were violating by including it in
| their repo, and there was no easy way to make the code work
| without those libraries. The poor license they wrote was just
| one of a myriad of issues. I think The Register's article is
| more accurately worded in this regard[0].
|
| [0] =
| https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winam...
| hulitu wrote:
| > But instead of bringing in someone in the community you just
| chased them away.
|
| As i remember, they were caught violating the GPL.
|
| I'm sorry, i don't think that law applies only to some
| unfortunate people.
| squarefoot wrote:
| And here's another story to add to the book "How to shoot
| yourself in the foot by not knowing how the Internet and software
| licenses work", should anyone write that one day.
|
| Also, from one ArsTechnica link posted later in this story, one
| former dev told that the 4 WA Legacy developers were fired and
| soon he left too, so I guess they presumably had either no one or
| very few resources who knew that code and were in the best
| position to audit it before public release. This is not just
| shooting oneself in the foot; it rather looks like dancing on a
| landmine.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| All I learnt was that there is absolutely no benefit to open
| sourcing previously proprietary code. It's all downsides with
| entitled shutins getting their rare drama fix with manufactured
| furor and unauthorized revenue sapping clones.
| Phrodo_00 wrote:
| It's not clear their license was open source, actually. OSI
| Makes free distribution the first part of the definition of
| open source, as well the ability to create derived works[1].
| Their rule against forking might clash against that.
|
| [1] https://opensource.org/osd
| mikeortman wrote:
| It's wild to nitpick the licensing like this. I get why its
| conter-intuitive and in violation of Github's guidelines, but
| it's winamp, folk. It has no intrinsic value these days to update
| or fork outside of giving people the opportunity to learn from
| the tricks they had to do to make stuff work. There are solutions
| significantly better and open source today. 'Canceling' winamp in
| 2024 was not on my life's bucket list after the year 2000.
|
| There is hypocrisy here around internet archive, it's totally OK
| to store copy-write content on the archive, but its not OK when a
| company does so on their own.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >It's wild to nitpick the licensing like this.
|
| It's not a nitpick, the library was self-contradictory. It
| claimed to be copyleft while not allowing distributing modified
| copies by anyone other than the rights holder.
|
| >There is hypocrisy here around internet archive, it's totally
| OK to store copy-write content on the archive, but its not OK
| when a company does so on their own.
|
| That's right, because it was the company that broke their
| contract with their vendor by making publicly available source
| code when they didn't have permission to do that. If that
| software vendor has a problem with the IA they can issue a DMCA
| request.
| pelorat wrote:
| Plenty of people have copies of the source and the release was
| just a novelty really. There's no point in anyone actually
| forking, building and releasing new versions of Winamp as it has
| been surpassed by other "real" OSS players eons ago. Let's face
| it, the release was mostly for Internet historians.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Given the license, I suppose so. It'd only be for a tinkerer
| who loved WinAnp but wanted to fix some nitpick in the player.
| Can't do much more than that.
|
| The bad faith interpretation is that this was an attempt to
| make use of previous goodwill to get some free labor to at the
| very least fix some bugs for them, or at most add in requested
| features to try to get it back on the map.
| bitbasher wrote:
| Anyone have a mirror of it?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Tech and gaming communities are the most toxic ones ever
| jfvinueza wrote:
| The article mentions how deeply compressed the files we played
| were back then, but I'm pretty sure nowadays it's even worse.
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| Not at all. Any song on youtube uploaded in the last 5-10 years
| is as good as a 320 kbit mp3. Why would it be with the
| bandwidth anyone has to today?
| hedgehog wrote:
| Even limiting the scope to MP3 at the same bitrates modern
| encoders are much better than what we had back in the 90s.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I think the poster is confusing/conflating dynamic range
| compression with file compression
| moomin wrote:
| This, btw, is why open sourcing proprietary software rarely
| happens: you actually have to go to a fair amount of careful
| effort to get it right. If you don't, you end up with this
| debacle.
| fsflover wrote:
| Or maybe you just shouldn't break the law.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >shouldn't break the law.
|
| What law? The law of the Gnu?
| fsflover wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41662105
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Yeah sorry fsflover, but a License, ToS or Patent is NOT
| a law, you really should know the difference ;)
| chx wrote:
| Ah you misunderstand.
|
| All free software licenses grant you additional rights on
| top of copyright law. These rights allow you to make
| copies of the software _given certain conditions_. If you
| violate them then they do not apply and only copyright
| law applies so any copies you made _are_ illegal.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| >copyright law applies
|
| First that's not true and even if that would be only true
| in the US. Since the US is not THE "law" you cant say
| that.
|
| Also:
|
| >Under the current law, works created on or after January
| 1, 1978, have a copyright term of life of the author plus
| seventy years after the author's death.
|
| https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
|
| So when Gates dies and i violate Microsofts License 7
| years later i can have DOS 6.22 for free and redistribute
| it right?
| chx wrote:
| Copyright law is universal under the Berne Convention and
| it prevents unlicensed duplicates of the software from
| legally being distributed. This is not US law, it's law
| everywhere, even the _very_ few countries which are not
| signatories to the Berne Convention are signatories to
| TRIPS.
|
| Gates does not hold the copyright for MS DOS 6.22 and
| it's not 7 years but 70. But yes, eventually yes, see how
| Sherlock Holmes became public domain. For PC software in
| 2024 this is not yet relevant, the Berne minimum is death
| plus 50 and the IBM PC is not yet 50 years old.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| Hmm, thanks!
|
| I learned something today,
| chx wrote:
| Even some countries which can't enter these international
| conventions because they are not part of the UN/WIPO due
| to lack of wide diplomatic recognition have laws to honor
| copyright as prescribed in Berne, it's too important for
| international trade. For example, part of the
| Stabilization and Association Agreement the European
| Union made with Kosovo included IP laws including
| copyright. https://cps.rks-gov.net/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/09/LAW_NO._0...
| lottin wrote:
| Copyright laws.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Not really. The reason in this case is that they wanted to
| share the source code _exclusively_ for direct collaboration
| under their own direction; so they wrote an incomprehensible
| and incoherent license, and gave up after everyone called them
| out on their bullshit.
| francisofascii wrote:
| This story is analogous to a landowner and a group of
| neighborhood kids. The landowner allows the kids to play baseball
| in his field, but then the kids complain the grass is not cut,
| they are playing late into the evening, a few kids vandalize
| damage his flower bed, and his lawyers tell him he will be sued
| if he doesn't make all these safety changes, and so the landowner
| says screw it and puts up a fence.
| jrflowers wrote:
| Rather in this analogy the landowner didn't own all of the
| field and somehow the kids get blamed for him failing to keep
| track of what he does and does not own.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| Good job, team. Companies are sure to open source their legacy
| proprietary applications now after that warm reception.
| jraph wrote:
| They didn't open source anything though. They shared some code
| under some restrictive license.
| zizee wrote:
| The "chilling" effect is still the same.
| jraph wrote:
| I hope companies will also recognize that by actually open
| sourcing their stuff and be more careful, things will go
| better.
|
| Of course the childish comments that seem to have been
| posted on github were probably not great, I think people
| should be respectful, so maybe the additional lesson here
| is that github, by trying hard to become a social network
| and not focusing on being a code host and issue tracker,
| succeeded in being a social network, with the whole
| package, attracting this kind of shitty behavior, and
| that's one more reason to avoid it now. You wouldn't upload
| your code on a social network, would you?
|
| If you don't want cooperation or forks, a zip anywhere will
| do.
| consteval wrote:
| Right, and what we're "chilling" is using software in a way
| not consistent with its license.
|
| That's good, IMO. Don't steal IP and you don't have to
| worry about getting caught for stealing IP. FYI: simply
| hiding the code doesn't fix the issue - disgruntled
| employees and whistleblowers do exist.
| filcuk wrote:
| In addition, they leaked proprietary code they didn't have
| rights to publish in the first place.
| paweladamczuk wrote:
| "Proprietary packages from Intel and Microsoft were also
| seemingly included in the release's build tools"
|
| Can anyone speak to this? To me, it's the most interesting bit in
| this article. Does this mean Winamp developers had access to
| libraries of Intel/MS that are not publicly available?
| kapep wrote:
| It would assume it's about packages that are publicly available
| but their license forbids redistribution.
| Woovie wrote:
| From my understanding they received code with contracts that
| forbid you from distribution.
| delduca wrote:
| Once on the internet, always on the internet.
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