thedoctor_o

I used to do plug-ins because it scratched an itch to code & provide things that'd be of use to others which when you've got a job to pay for that free time then it's less of an issue. Also the time of winamp & the plug-in / skin community of the time were somewhat reflective of how interested people were in tech vs how commoditised it's now become & generically boring imho. And I'm probably guilty of the change in behaviours with how I'm trying to fund wacup but 2 decades on is a long time & most of those early creatives have bills to pay.

There were winamp3 / modern 5.x skins which were freeform in nature so could be all sorts of shapes or not depending on what the skinner wanted it to be like. With 5.x still supporting the fixed form classic / 2.x skins as webamp & its skin museum support.

They were never going to remove that as this is all about only them benefiting from free dev resources.

I didn't see anything wrong with asking about it & I as don't really use HN I'm not sure of what the expectations, etc are on here. So imho its all good from my view point.

They're very unlikely to have that as I don't remember it falling under the remit of things to be collated when things were sold from aol to what now calls itself "winamp" - they primarily got a stripped down 5.666 & what's offered is their iterations though aspects of what was winamp3 would be within the gen_ff plug-in.

It was either sell it & shoutcast or kill both off since aol in 2013 was changing & there's lots of other projects under them at that time which were killed off instead of what was thought to be a better option to keep it going elsewhere.

Alas going to radionony which has ended up becoming llama group after some funny business stuff going on was a mistake though some of the other options that I was aware of at the time weren't great either.

And I'm not defending aol either as there were things that I didn't like under their almost 15yr tenure of ownership but it was never condescending like this lot have been over the past 11yrs which their licensing terms have reinforced.

They dumped the prior dev team over a year ago (the ones that added the nft plug-in & fanzone crap) & it is mostly a ploy to get a free dev team as was speculated when the whole "source available" thing got announced 4 months ago (but they seem to have left it to the night before to do anything hence the complete mess that's been going on).

The license was always going to be restrictive & focused on what only benefits them as they would never want any clones, etc to be able to make use of it. Also the terms when I look at it from an ex plug-in dev stance seem to prevent any new / updated plug-ins from being built with the plug-in api headers which afaict would fall under their license & surplanting the prior one (no idea if they've changed the in-file stuff or not as I cannot look at their code to avoid issues with work my own player).

They've worded it just as they intended imho (ignoring the confusion over fork aspect) as it's how to ensure that they're still in charge & to prevent anything derivative as they really don't like that based on prior experience with them.

It's also mostly about getting that lovely free dev work because with oh so many capable devs out there they're just going to be clamouring to want to give up anything where possible to be able to work on this along with trying to appear to be doing good. Even though they've halted development at least 3 times I'm aware off & ditched a number of dev teams under their 11yr tenure of ownership.

It's just a habit I have when I'm replying to things so I'll try to remember to avoid doing it on here.

The history section just above the prior properties section is what's now the case with winamp & shoutcast under unrelated organisations nowadays. Though it's all a bit murky as radionomy & audiovalley were the same top people.

-dro

llama group / "winamp" don't own shoutcast anymore as that was all sold off a year or so ago to azerion as part of changing audiovalley into llama group.

-dro

Those names were some of the original devs & they're the ones who put it in the easter egg on the about dialog that it relates to as a hacker-like joke. The source code is what aol sold on as a stripped down copy of 5.666 & then what radionomy/audiovalley/llama group iterated on afterwards. As much as I dislike what now calls itself "winamp", it's nothing nefarious & you can find old 2.x installs with that about easter egg text.

-dro

That'd mean they'd have to do more work then necessary & there'd at most only ever be what went back to the stripped down 5.666 code deliverable they got after it was sold on from AOL at the start of 2014 (was looked into but determined not worth the hassle when that was being sorted out at the time).

-dro

What has been "provided" is the stripped down 5.666 source bundle given to radionomy when sold on from AOL & the end result of their iterations up to the 5.9.2 release. So it's made up of the however many years of the 1.x -> 2.x -> 5.x development process & however many different people hacked upon it in that time (aka a mess).

Yes there's a large part of winamp3 in there which was already long since open sourced properly in the aol era (unlike this heavily restricted licensing terms) but from what I remember when making the code deliverable the dedicated winamp3 repository was never provided (assuming my memory from 11yrs ago is still good).

-dro

No legit project could ever make use of the leaked source code even if it was from just before the end of the pre-sale AOL era so the person who did that never actually helped anyone & imho just hindered things.

I can't use it for WACUP & I don't see how any of the other players out there (clone / compatibles / just looking to hack in some features from it) could ever use it either.

There's also the whole "source available" thing they announced earlier this year still likely means it's never going to be proper open source against how media / others at the time took it to mean. Not like things couldn't be done via plug-ins but for whatever reason so many seem to forget about that & only see source code as the only way to modify things which imho is just going to make things messier if / when something does happen.

-dro