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Comment by AdamJacobMuller | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.

Of course they didn't know what they were doing. It was written by a 19-year-old in the mid 90s. The code is messy with poor licensing and some build tools were included in the repository and they wrote a dumb license for it? Who cares, they shipped a product that 10s of millions of people used and loved and wanted to share that code up to the world and instead of embracing the best of what they were trying to do while helping them to make things better, the community piled on them until they said it was so not worth it that just pulled the whole thing.

Bravo and job well done.

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The original code may have been written by a 19 year old in 1997, but that license was written this year. Winamp has changed owners several times since then. The original author hasn't worked on it a decade at least.

The "they" that made that license is not the "they" that originally wrote it.

The most recent "they" is a European corporation. "They" are the ones trying to use open source as free labor. This isn't the case of "some dumb kid who didn't understand licensing", this is the case of a large international corporation trying to exploit the public for free labor. That's it.

The "they" who originally wrote Winamp, Justin Frankel among others, understands licensing well enough to know when to use GPL and when to keep it closed as he has projects in both areas.

Of course a lot of us have a soft spot for Winamp. It was a formative part of internet culture in the late 90s and early 00s. That and Napster was kind of the first step to things like iTunes and Spotify. But let's be honest here. What the Llama Group did was hilariously inept in the best case and ineptly exploitative in the worst.

>Who cares

Other license holders who would at best DMCA Github and take it down anyway. And at worst sue WinAnp for infringement? This is really bad for them. But if you only care about getting to use a decent product, I guess you don't have to care.

This stuff makes FOSS look bad tho. And would only discourage others from trying to make their source available. So I and others care when thinking of the forest instead of the beautiful tree.

Well, I guess Winamp cares the most that they are breaking the law, because it's a risk for them. They just didn't realize but now that the community notified them about it, they wisely removed their public billboard showing they're breaking the law.

> Bravo and job well done

Bravo indeed, it's important these things get done so that people can be better educated on software licenses and open source. If we want to discourage stealing, we have to tell people stealing is bad.

We do absolutely nobody any favors by carving out exceptions for whatever darling piece of software we love.

> It doesn't meet your definition of the word open.

That's a disingenuous argument. It doesn't meet the OSI's definition of open.

> the community piled on them until they said it was so not worth it that just pulled the whole thing.

Yes, but let's be honest: If it wasn't the community, it would have been DMCA takedown requests from the companies whose software was published in the repo. At best, the community hastened the end of the repo by a few weeks.

Assuming they know, care and want to spend resources writing a DMCA request.

You have to issue a DMCA, because if you don't defend your own IP then courts will assume you don't care about your IP.

That's more trademark. You can choose to let anyone use your ip for a fee or not.

OK why do I care about how the OSI defines a word which predates the existence of the OSI by over 1000 years?

Not all definitions are created equal (you seemed to imply that yourself when you said "It doesn't meet your definition of the word open") and the OSI definition is widely considered the de facto standard. Of course no definition is perfect, so if you have specific issues with the OSI definition of open source, go ahead and explain them and your suggested alternative. Otherwise you are making an argument that's impossible to engage with because it's amorphous by design.

Because if you disregard it you will constantly be getting in online arguments with license nerds

The term open-source was coined with an express purpose closely aligned with the definition maintained by the OSI. The OSI also traces its lineage to the coinage of the term; all of the coiners endorse the OSD.

Anyone can read about this here: https://opensource.org/history

But it's well-documented elsewhere, too.

The term 'open-source' is political, as much as it aimed to 'depoliticize' free software. Its definition is and always has been normative rather than merely descriptive. The term and concept exist to serve a movement, and anyone who is invested in that movement's goals is likely to be invested in promoting a historically informed understanding of both.

As for why you, specifically should care about the concept, I think I don't have the patience to make the case right now. But if you're genuinely interested in that question, I'd be happy to provide links to resources if you let me know what sorts of media you enjoy/have energy for.

I care for the same reason I don't like deliberately confusing product packaging.

Agreed. The "purists" are dickwads.

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