Open-sourcing of WinAmp goes badly as owners delete entire repo

[branfont]

The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs.

The deletion happened soon after The Register enquired about the seeming inclusion of Shoutcast DNAS code and some Microsoft and Intel codecs.

Yes, WinAmp is still around: the audio player of choice for the Napster generation. You know, folks who are in their 40s now and are starting to get middle-aged presbyopia. If they remove their new reading glasses, it might make some of the many skins in the WinAmp Skin Museum look rather better.

Peer-to-peer downloads of MP3s are just a tad passé now, but don't panic: there's a WinAmp web player as well, and mobile apps. Better still, it fulfilled a long-felt want upon which The Register reported over a decade ago.

Owners Llama Group relaunched the venerable Windows media player back in 2023. And then a few months ago in May, the company announced that later in 2024 it would release the source code, too. As promised, it did so in September – and that of quite a few other products as well. Whoops.

 

 

https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/

[Dick Montage]

I had heard that the code, and the repo was an utter mess.  Explains why it took so long for this to happen.