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.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
How the hell do you combine "open source" and "all distribution rights are reserved for the original developer"? That's a nonsensical combination, the whole point of open source is that you can make your own copy with your own changes and distribute it to people
This is wrong. Permissively licensed (MIT, BSD, WTFPL, Apache, etc.) free software is still free software. Open-source requires the provision of the same right to distribute modified copies as free software does.
Copyleft licenses like the GPL assert the same right recursively for downstream users, more or less (details vary between copyleft licenses). But granting the right (to distribute modified copies) to first-order recipients of the source code is common to all free and open-source licenses. That's great! I imagine it's what you're getting at with the phrase 'properly secured'.
But to qualify as open-source, a license must allow redistribution of modified copies, and copyleft is not the only kind of free software license
See (for instance) the Free Software Foundation Europe's FAQ entry 'what is open-source software?':
> Ah yes the totally unbiased OSD made by companies wanting to exploit free labor like Amazon.
The OSD does not originate with Amazon. Its ideas and text are drawn from the free software movement and indeed from a not-for-profit, volunteer-driven, community-based project-- namely Debian. Its text is essentially lifted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The term 'open-source' was created to describe an effort by a commercial entity, though-- for the project that would eventually give us Firefox, at a time when the web was dominated by a deeply proprietary monopoly in Internet Explorer.
But all of this should be common knowledge among 'hackers'. At any rate it is extremely easy to discover.
> prescriptivist language
Talk about knowing enough to be dangerous! lol.
> I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.
Okay? You are successfully resisting being nagged about your use of terms. You are also broadcasting your ignorance of the giants whose shoulders software developers stand upon today.
Software, like many things that can satisfy human needs and wants, is an instrument and mechanism of power. In particular, software and the terms under which it is distributed are often a mechanism by which the software publishers exert power and control over the software's users. 'Open-source', like its more frank ancestor 'free software', exists to signal terms of software distribution that variously protect users from certain strategies of domination by software vendors. Historically (and recently!), that signal associated with the phrase 'open-source' has been a fairly clear (if simplistic) one, because the phrase's usage has been consistent.
When you choose how you will or won't use the phrase 'open-source', you are making a choice about how useful a signal that phrase will be for such purposes in the future. What language is 'correct' in this case gets at a practical and political question we can alternatively get at without any commitment or appeal to a notion of linguistic correctness. That question is this: should there be ready ways to identify terms of software distribution that seek to spare software users from domination by software suppliers?
If one's answer to that is 'yes', then it takes a bit of footwork to get to 'I intend to participate in applying this established safety label to unsafe things'.
> calling things open source whenever I can see the source code
This kind of behavior is arguably a predictable outcome of the strategy of distancing the licensing tactics of the free software movement from that movement's explicit politics, articulations of its on motivations, etc.
> Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor?
Simple. Because the company literally wrote this in their press release[1] at the time they were releasing it.
Direct quote “This is an invitation to global
collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and
passion to help this iconic software evolve.”
Further direct quote: “With this initiative to open the source code, Winamp is taking the next step in its history, allowing its users to contribute directly
to improving the product.”
They are literaly soliciting free labor.
This is how the press release ends: “Interested developers can now make themselves known at the following address:
about.winamp.com/free-llama” what is that if not a solicitation for free labour?
> anybody who does contribute does so under their own free will, under the terms set forth by the license
So wait. Just so I understand. Is your problem that you think they are falsely accused of soliciting free labour? Or that they are indeed fully were soliciting free labour but you would rather not want people harsh your vibes by discussing this?
My point is simple: if someone contributes, they accept the terms. Complaining about ‘free labor’ is irrelevant. The contributor chose to contribute; if they didn’t agree with the terms, they wouldn’t have. Nobody is asking for an uninvolved third-party to police the collaboration.
I'd also be careful attributing these actions to malice without further motive, when it very well could also be attributed to excitement i.r.t. sharing and collaborating on Winamp's source code in public, under a single-source.
That assumes that everyone has full information of course. Discussing the terms publicly is helping everyone reach that state.
> Nobody is asking for an uninvolved third-party to police the collaboration.
And someone is asking you to police what people are chatting about here? Doesn’t feel to be an entirely thought through argument.
> I'd also be careful attributing these actions to malice without further motive
I don’t actually care if they are “malicious” or “inept” or “ill informed” or anything else. In fact I think someone was excited about the open collaboration, and someone else at the company was worried about losing business opportunities and that is how we ended up with this situation. Maybe it was even the same person at different times.
Maybe they heard about open source but never really understood the concept, and the motivations of people participating in it.
Or maybe they are just as greedy as they appear to be.
Who knows and who cares. What matters is that this is a rough deal and people should not play within their rules.
> attributing these actions to malice without further motive
these actions could be construed as malice, but i would definitely attribute them as greed. AKA, they want contributions, but want to prevent anyone else but themselves from being able to commercially exploit it.
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.
If they're winding it down, then they may as well make it fully OSS, and ditch the components that are proprietary that they can't release. Attribution can get complex with old software IP, especially when using such proprietary components.
It's not speculation. Someone claiming to have been an employee posted a comment to the article. It's impossible to verify, but personally I have no problem believing it played out as they say.
I agree that as an author, you’re free to pick any license you want. If you want to release source code just to allow PRs, and don’t market it as open source – go for it.
Fair Source is a better model in that regard, kudos for using that! And I personally have no problem with using the term “open source” for that, although just using the distinct term is better.
In case of Winamp though, they:
1. Used a crayon license that prohibited pretty much everything and was indeed focused on collaboration
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.
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?
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
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".
I think we all would have been better off, with time & energy better spent if they had never tried to release like this, so discouraging others of trying to do the same is a feature, not a bug. For example, consider how much time I spent reading your comment & composing this response; it would have been better spent closing my eyes and taking some deep breaths for a minute or two.
