Winamp: Source code no longer online

At the end of September, the owners of the brand and the Winamp software made the sources available openly in a Github repository as announced. The repository no longer exists. It was deleted without any further information.

There was already a great deal of skepticism at the time the Winamp sources were made available. A proprietary, restrictive license came with the sources, which led to widespread outrage and the turning away of potentially interested developers.

Winamp open source: The sticking point of the license

The hopes of some that Winamp would release the sources under a permissive license such as GPL or even as public domain were quickly dashed. The company opted for its own proprietary license, which it calls the "Winamp Collaborative License (WCL)". However, this was initially far too restrictive – and did not allow the project to be forked, which is a prerequisite for further development. The company therefore quickly upgraded the license to version 1.0.1 and deleted the sentence: "No Forking: You may not create, maintain, or distribute a forked version of the software".

Nevertheless, the license gave the impression that Winamp was looking for free developers who would simply donate their manpower to the company. Apparently, hardly any programmers were willing to do this.

Calling up the Github repository currently only returns an HTTP 404 error page, it no longer exists. The Internet Archive contains a final copy dated October 9, 2024, by which time the project had made around 2700 forks. In addition, 36 pull requests were submitted to –, most of which wanted to make corrections to the restrictive license.

There are some indications that the sources contained code that Winamp does not have exclusive rights to distribute under its own license. This apparently includes the Intel IPP components, but proprietary, non-open source code from Dolby is also said to have been found in the repository.

Meanwhile, the Winamp company has remained silent. It is not giving any information about the reasons for deleting the sources. Winamp has not yet responded to an inquiry from heise online.

In mid-May of this year, Winamp announced that it would release the source code for the formerly popular software of the same name. This allowed the company to attract some attention, but the brief excursion without any real further development of the software is unlikely to breathe new life into the 27-year-old project in the long term.

(dmk)