It’s been a while since most of us used or just thought about Winamp. But now there is a whole lot going on with the MP3 player of yore, mostly due to a remarkably chaotic source code release.
As previously announced, Winamp, through its Belgian owner Llama Group, provided “the Legacy Player Code” on September 24 so that developers could “contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.”
The code was made available, 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.