[ndiddy]

Some context: Winamp's owners have been going through financial difficulties since last year and as a result have laid off the skeleton crew they previously had maintaining Winamp (their main focus seems to be a streaming service also called Winamp for HTML5 and phones). This looks like they're willing to let the community take over maintenance for PC Winamp, which beats letting it die IMO.

https://forums.winamp.com/forum/winamp/winamp-site-design/46...

[peppertree]

Still waiting on KaZaA open source. Kids these days don't know what it's like trying to download a music video and end up watching someone getting beheaded.

[zztop44]

I’m pretty sure kids these days do know exactly what that’s like (although they wouldn’t be downloading the music video and it wouldn’t have taken over an hour for a shitty 2.3mb file)

[giancarlostoro]

Or downloading Windows XP.ISO and booting up Ubuntu. 15 year old me was confused and enraged.

[nehal3m]

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, l33tness.

[sexy_seedbox]

So br00tal

[niutech]

There are open source clients for FastTrack protocol based on giFT (https://sourceforge.net/projects/gift/): Apollon (https://apollon.sourceforge.net) and KCeasy (http://www.kceasy.com).

[wrigby]

I realize this is a joke, but can’t resist mentioning that LimeWire was (is?) open source (or at least used an open network in GnuTella)

[mrmincent]

And funnily enough, gnutella being a creation of Justin Frankel, the creator of Winamp as well.

[RevEng]

I really appreciate them doing this. I wish more companies would release their source - even as is - if they are dissolving the corporation anyway.

[testernews]

that explains why i had such a terrible fucking time with their “creator” side, was supposed to have a rep, help setting up, promotion, etc and they didn’t do fuck all for a year and then tried to charge me for it a year later

[trogdor]

Winamp has (/had) a creator side? I thought it was just a media player.

[larodi]

Why does a company has to go bankrupt to open source? It’s like something that owners want to do in order to be able to fork, not something that is being done for the community or open side of it.

[cortesoft]

Well, their business model was selling the software… it is harder to do that if it is open source.

Once you are going bankrupt, you are going to lose the asset anyway, so there is no incentive to keep it closed source.

Is it really that hard to figure out why a company open sources when going bankrupt?

[talldatethrow]

Wouldn't the lenders be pissed you essentially gave away one of the valuable assets they could have sold off to someone else?

[Rinzler89]

Source code is not the main asset that makes the final product. Doom is also open source but if you compile the source you won't get the game that's on the self. You still need the game assets for that and those are not open source, you need to buy the game to get those.

[larodi]

I understand this part, what I really meant is that it is a pity so much opens source is born as a Phoenix coming out of burned companies…

[Uehreka]

I just got here from the “DoJ moves to legalize weed” comment section, and I have the same thing to say: I don’t care why people do a good thing, I’m uncomplicatedly happy it happened.