this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2024
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Here's the story:
Company buys the rights to Winamp, tries to get the community to do their dev work for free, fails. That's it.
The 'Winamp source license' was absurdly restrictive. There was nothing open about it. You were not allowed to fork the repo, or distribute the source code or any binaries generated from it. Any patches you wrote became the property of Llama Group without attribution, and you were prohibited from distributing them in either source or binary form.
There were also a couple of surprises in the source code, like improperly included GPL code and some proprietary Dolby source code that never should have been released. The source code to Shoutcast server was also in there, which Llama group doesn't actually own the rights to.
This was a lame attempt to get the community to modernize Winamp for free, and it failed.
Of course many copies of the source code have been made, they just can't be legally used or distributed.
Shouldn't that force a GPL release of the rest of the code, at least the bits they had the rights to?
Not necessarily. It means that Llama group, and perhaps the original Nullsoft, have violated the license of whatever open source developer wrote that code originally. So the only ones who could actually go after them to force anything are the ones who originally wrote that GPL code. They would basically have to sue Llama group, and they might also have a case against Nullsoft / AOL (who bought Nullsoft) for unjust enrichment over the years Winamp was popular.
Chances are it would get settled out of court, they would basically get paid a couple thousand bucks to go away. Even if they did have a legal resources to take it all the way to a trial, it is unlikely the end result would be compelling a GPL release of all of the Winamp source. Would be entertaining to see them try though.
Complicating that however, is the fact that if it's a common open source library that was included, there may be dozens of 'authors' and it would take many or all of them to agree to any sort of settlement.
Not necessarily, the SFC is involved in a big case regarding Vizio about this right now.
Yeah but I'm not gonna sue or risk getting sued over it.
Unless you are one of the original developers who wrote the GPL code included in Winamp, you have no standing to sue them anyway.
Wouldn't an end user of something that should be GPLed be able to request the source?
That depends a lot on how the license gets interpreted and how license violations are handled by the local law. The argument for why the end user cannot do anything about GPL violation is that the violated contract is between upstream and the "bad" developer - the upstream project gave the bad developer access to their source code under the condition that the license stays the same. You as the end user only get exposed to the bad developer's license, so you can't do anything. It's the upstream who must force them to extend a proper license to you.
However there was also a case recently where the FSF argued that this interpretation / handling of the situation is against the spirit of GPL and I think they won, so... Yeah, it's just unclear. Which is normal for legal texts (IMHO intentionally, but I'm not here to rag on lawyers, so I'll leave it at that).
Any details on that case you remember? Sounds fascinating.
Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.
The author of the GPL'd code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.
Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.
However if it's a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.