Last week, AOL announced that version 5.66 of its Winamp media player would be its last and that all support and downloads for the 15-year old free application would end on December 20th. Now a movement to convince AOL to turn over the Winamp code to the open source community has started a petition that has already generated over 12,000 online signatures.
The petition, as posted on the Change.org site, was begun by a group of software developers who have joined together to launch the Save Winamp campaign. Their very basic idea is that Winamp should continue to be supported and developed as an open source project, rather than just have its software die off. We have emailed AOL to see if there is a possibility of the company turning Winamp over to the open source community.
The petition has begun to pick up steam even as online rumors claim that Microsoft could be in talks to acquire Winamp from AOL, along with its Shoutcast streaming media service. Even if that happens, there"s no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to release new versions of Winamp beyond the current 5.66 client.
Thanks to Ciprian Rusen for the tip!
Source: Save Winamp | Image via Save Winamp