Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, posted the source for its “Legacy Player Code” on September 24 so that developers could “contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.”
Less than a month later, that repository has been entirely deleted, after it either bumped up against or broke its strange hodgepodge of code licenses, seemingly revealed the source code for other non-open software packages, and made a pretty bad impression on the open-source community.
“Collaborative” licensing
Winamp’s code was made available in late September, but not very open. Under the “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.
