https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...
Once you are going bankrupt, you are going to lose the asset anyway, so there is no incentive to keep it closed source.
Is it really that hard to figure out why a company open sources when going bankrupt?
Interesting that there's no mention of what licence the source is being released under - and it's only available following email enquiries, of all things. I'm surprised they're even bothering, at this point - the software's so obsolete that it's not like it has much in the way of value anymore beyond nostalgia.
I'm not even one of those people who likes the shitty visualisations, I just think the interface works perfectly.
> Will it be free ?
> Yes WACUP will be free to download & to use.
> This is an independent project & due to the amount of time & effort which is involved, I am accepting donations (and other means of support) to help cover my living costs whilst I'm working on getting this developed & released. As at this time, this is a full-time project for me whilst I see where the future will take me & this project.
I cannot live without stuff like equalizers, visualization plugins, Last.FM scrobbing and even automated track "ripping" of radio stations.
It makes me so sad the state of current audio players like YouTube Music, Spotify, Tidal and the likes. featurewise they are so... bland. Millenials and GenZs just don't enjoy music the same way I used to enjoy it. Maybe it is because there so much of it now that it doesn't matter so much
I'm still not sure exactly what I'm missing, as I have the "gist" of the visualizer working, but it just doesn't look as smooth as Winamp's. I think I need slight persistence and the little effect with the 'caps' that slowly fall down for each column (right now mine looks too jittery).
Relatedly, they might be hoping that one of the people looking at it might be willing to buy out or take over contractual responsibility for any components that can't be relicensed to traditional open source. Basically, parading the source around like a debutante because other channels to find buyers haven't panned out.
Or it's just real-world commercial code and is kind of embarassing by the standards of public open source projects.
I had just graduated graduate school for international economics, and was working for a government contractor who only hired me because I had a masters (they could charge the government more). Because of this, I literally had nothing to do and would just sit in the office.
I eventually figured out an excuse to get my employer to buy Photoshop for me and I started learning it on company time. When Winamp came out with the update to add skins, I ended up making one of the very first skins (meshAMP) which became really popularly.
https://archive.org/details/winampskins_meshAmp
(I am cringing looking at it now)
This led to contract job with STB (to design interfaces for a TV Tuner card they had) and eventually 3DFX (paid in 3d video cards), and eventually a career change and a job as a graphic designer.
Except, I was not a good designer, so I quickly learned to program (ASP.net and then JAVA), which led to Macromedia Flash, which led to Macromedia Generator, which eventually led to a job offer from Macromedia (now Adobe), where I still am (sadly, sans Flash).
Anyways, thank your WinAMP!
Skinning was pretty easy to do. The packaging format was a zip archive with a renamed extension. You could do a lot with a little photoshop skills and trial and error.
So many people used it that skins would get a lot of distribution, too.
Here's an example: http://www.delphicorner.f9.co.uk/articles/forms4.htm
It was a long time ago, but IIRC I was using Visual C++ (a very nice compiler that was the first to implement the STL as written) having abandoned Borland Foundation Classes (? name ?) which was dreadful. Woeful.
MFC, the MS C++ offering for writing Windows apps was impossible to use and undocumented at the time. We subscribed to those piles of CDs that MS would send out regularly and I could only find decent documentation for the C API, not the MFC one. Weird.
I used an explicit event loop (simple for a Computer Science graduate like I was) and the C API inside my C++ programme and it worked a treat
Those were (not) the days....
This was back in 96-97?
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/dd9931b75c11c570ff8ceabee499e7...
https://skins.webamp.org/skin/d77a144cdb775a0937617389b6e0e4...
The previous codebase had been more or less just C, written by Justin Frankel. I think everyone kind of hated Winamp 3. It was very buggy. The plugin framework was extremely complicated. I wonder which source code they'll open up. Maybe both.
So was that at AOL?
It's not quite as pretty out of the box, but it makes up for it with some insane customizability. It also has a very robust ecosystem of components, and works very well in Wine.
Large, living companies like Microsoft can work with their lawyers to confidently understand what they're releasing when opening up old code and indemnify theythemselves appropriately, but a troubled company on its last legs can't nexessarily budget for all that.
Commercial software of that vintage was not built from dependencies that were all open source themselves, nor were there necessarily contributor/contractor agreements that kept copyright in a suitable place for open source relicencing. They might have been prepared for explicit rights transfer to another party, and maybe disclosure as they're suggesting here, but relicensing is a different thing.
Years ago Microsoft used to do stuff like this, notably releasing .NET Framework under its Reference Source License (you're allowed to look at the code, but that's about it).
(There is also some nice music there)
[0]: https://webamp.org/
But what I really want to know is: will it really kick the LLaMAs ass now with AI features?
It seems like every 5 years ago there's a big "Winamp is BACK" announcement paired with some new nonsense related to whatever the big tech buzzword of the day is. Last time it was blockchains.
Strange how memory works.
Looking forward to this code being lightly maintained for minimal compatibility with future OSes. I dislike change!
Which license will be used? "Opening up" is not exactly GPL.
I'm not sure that "opening up" actually means what you may appear to think that it means.
The entirety of present-day Winamp could be released, with code, under the GPL tomorrow and nothing says the org that owns Winamp will somehow cease to own Winamp, or that they must accept others' changes into their own source tree.
(And that's perfectly OK, even under the restrictions of the GPL.)
Check it out https://re-amp.ru
I was shocked to wake up and read about this in the news.
I remember one version was fantastic, and then the next version sucked. I'm pretty sure this was due to a change in ownership or something
I remember I used to use http://oldversion.com [1] to download the previous one
Ever since then I have been wary of "improvements" that make software worse, which has been happening a lot recently.
I'd be really interested in seeing the source code to the original. I didn't know much about programming then, and to me that would be similar to reading the original source code of Doom (which I've done a bit)
[1] this site still seems alive? But doesn't even have https?
Winamp 3 was a major regression that sparked a backlash (in particular it had a new skin engine that probably was a priori better, but broke compatibility all existing skins, which wasn't popular; also performance, which had been a major selling point, was worse), but I don't remember there being any change of ownership or monetization effort. I think it was just a genuine well-intentioned rewrite that ended up worse than the original, like Netscape 4 or KDE4.
Notable mention on BEOS ... CL-Amp
Maybe plug-in NewPipe or similar instead and fork it?
There are 5 press releases total on that site, 2 from 2023, 2 from 2024, and this one from year "1". It just seems very strange.
