Winamp releases its source code on GitHub — but the legacy media player doesn’t go full open-source

Yesterday, the beloved legacy media player application Winamp released its source code on GitHub. Winamp isn’t as popular in today’s era of apps that stream music with licensing built in (a la Spotify and Apple Music), but back in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was by far the most popular third-party media player on PC. That should make this a momentous occasion— however, as many members of the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) community have quickly pointed out, its highly restrictive license prevents a lot of what we’d usually expect from releases like this. So, while Winamp is on GitHub and this is a source code release, it’s not like the application has gone “full” open source or anything.

Typically, source code releases correspond to new branches of a given piece of software, often ones that test improvements that may or may not return to the original. However, the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) Version 1.0.1 dictates that there will be “No Distribution of Modified Versions: You may not distribute modified versions of the software, whether in source or binary form.” Unfortunately, this means we won’t see any enhanced or “classic” versions of Winamp anytime soon, at least not from this release.

That’s another point of contention—if you only care about the classic version of Winamp, you may be a little disappointed by the modern-day version of the application, which is all included with this release. Winamp Classic can still be found elsewhere on the web but isn’t open-sourced—and ideally, a GitHub release like this would be definitive and have an open enough license for the community to evolve Winamp to its highest form.

On the bright side, fanatics of the classic Winamp designs aren’t out of luck if they want to keep that aesthetic. Plenty of classic Winamp skins for current Winamp exist, and some enthusiasts even go as far as building physical Winamp-themed music boxes, a la Linamp.

Hopefully, future versions of the Winamp Collaborative License (WCL) will remove some of these restrictions, allowing the FOSS community to do the work it would like on such a beloved, historical application. If they have the rights and the files, a proper open-sourcing of Classic Winamp would alto make many enthusiasts happy.